Jennifer Senior

This book is about the experience of being a parent. It takes a look at the various ways children throw your life a completely new realm. There's the bad -- they decrease your autonomy, strain your marriage, require a lot of work, bring a whole new host of social pressures (and all that gets worse with adolescence) -- and then there's the good. The good is harder to describe concisely. The best the author could do is the statement that gave her the title of the book -- that children are all joy and no fun. The book tries to capture some essence of that joy: the way children help you escape from your day-to-day self, the way they help you see the world with new eyes, and the sometimes heartbreaking joy of loving someone so much.

While this book did a great job of capturing the feelings of parenthood, of putting into words feelings that are familiar to me even after less than a year of being a parent, in the end, it was more a memoir of the experience of being a parent than an analysis of modern parenthood (a well researched memoir, to be fair). For many people, that probably hits just the point that they are looking for, but my preference in general is for books to dive a little more deeply into the whys and therefores than this one did.… (meer)

I don't know who the audience of "All Joy and No Fun" is supposed to be, but it's certainly not me. I kept stopping the book, re-reading passages aloud to my partner, and then we'd both giggle and say, "Who are these people?"

Here is what I learned:

A. Being a parent means that you are not the protagonist in your own story anymore, and if you're not ok with that, then parenting is going to be rough on you. (Technically I didn't really "learn" that, since we'd already thought it through and discussed it ad nauseum before we decided to become parents.)

B. If there are cracks in your relationship about communication and/or division of labor, then babies will make it worse. So get your act together before procreating. Also, having one parent stay at home seems to exacerbate the situation. Unless you are independently wealthy, one stay-at-home parent is a recipe for divorce. Get thee back to work.

C. Lots of middle class white families need to chill the f out already.

I felt so super smug after reading this book. It's good to feel smug.… (meer)