You're Not the Boss of Me

After sitting on my reading list for two years, I finally bought this book, after all three of my public library systems refused to buy it. Now I know why. From a first-paragraph description of the sexual position used to conceive her first child, Erika Schickel spends 228 pages bemoaning her “pussy belly,” hating her minivan, vacillating between alterna- and trad-moms, playing Grand Theft Auto, and getting lap dances from female strippers.

I enjoy warts-and-all mothering books, because it was the most difficult, demanding and immediate-reward-deficient assignment of my life. But a history of drugs used by stay-at-home moms to medicate their misery (while bitching about how hard it is to quit smoking weed)? Excuses for how much you hate your cat, to the point of returning it to the shelter? (As a mother of three refugee dogs, that one really set me off.) Losing your cookies because foot surgery hurts and renders you temporarily handicapped?

I should have known this book wasn’t for me when I saw Susan Reinhardt’s prominent blurb. She and Schickel peddle the same tone-deaf pseudo-humor (apparently the specialty of their publisher, Kensington), and I’m dedicating the rest of my life to avoiding it.

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A Girl and Her Books

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