A Moment of Jen

A Moment of Jen

THE NEXT BEST THING — In Stores July 3rd!

Saturday, November 29, 2003
posted by Jen at 11/29/2003 10:42:00 PM

Happy Thanksgiving, and greetings from Connecticut, where my mother's new mouse is shaped like the Viagra-sponsored Nascar car. No, I could not tell you why.

One of the nine hundred things that nobody tells you about becoming a parent is the way it changes the way you read.

I picked up WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, Lionel Shriver's latest, for some vacation entertainment for the weekend. I read pretty much the whole thing last night in one horrified gulp.

The book is written from the point of view of a smart, urbane mother whose almost-sixteen-year-old takes Columbine-style revenge on his classmates. It tells the story of the narrator's marriage, her ambivalence over her pregnancy, her failure to bond with baby Kevin, who seems like a bad seed from the get-go. He burns out two nannies in the space of his first year, is unbelievably sadistic to his classmates and his sister, is wearing diapers until he's six (which I found one of the most disturbing parts of all)....and it only goes downhill as he gets older.

The book was brilliantly observed, wonderfully written, with lots of trenchant points about life in America, the culture of blame, what the world expects of mothers and how quickly it lays blame at their feet when their children do horrible things (and never, one of Shriver's characters points out, at the feet of their fathers).

But I couldn't read it with any degree of detachment. It was one of the worst things I could imagine any mother going through, and Shriver imagined it far too vividly.

My husband and I have had lots of talks about how we'd handle a nerdy, socially inept kid (having both been NSIKs ourselves, we can deliver multiple, fairly convincing versions of the "Your life will not suck like this forever" speech).

We joke sometimes about how we'd be totally bewildered by a popular, outgoing kid, but I imagine we could muddle our way through that, too.

But a child like Kevin in Shriver's book? No clue.

Anyhow. We saw MASTER AND COMMANDER today, which was great, and I bought a few new books to get me through, and La Lu debuted her new snowsuit (complete with fold-over, and thus impossible to lose mittens and foot-covering-things!)

Finally, a shoe update. Upon the recommendation of many readers, we ordered Lucy two pairs of Robeez.

Which means that now, instead of picking discarded baby socks off the floors and sidewalks, I'm picking up discarded socks and Robeez. I don't know how she's doing it, but she's kicking them off, too.

I give up.
| #

Welcome to A Moment of Jen, author Jennifer Weiner's constantly-updated take on books, baby, and news of the world. Email me at jen (a) jenniferweiner.com.

JenniferWeiner.com
Facebook
Follow me on Twitter

To order Then Came You, click on the cover

To order Fly Away Home, click on the cover

To order Best Friends Forever, click on the cover

To order Certain Girls, click on the cover

To order The Guy Not Taken, click on the cover

To order Goodnight Nobody, click on the cover:

To order Little Earthquakes, click on the cover:

To order In Her Shoes, click on the cover:

To order Good In Bed, click on the cover:

My bio
JenniferWeiner.com
Advice For Aspiring Writers

This weblog is now syndicated via this link.

Subscribe to
Posts [Atom]

Jen International

Goodnight Nobody - Norway

Little Earthquakes - Norway

The Guy Not Taken - UK

Good In Bed - Japan

Good In Bed - Dutch

The Guy Not Taken (Dutch)

Goodnight, London!

Goodnight, Amsterdam!

Petit Earthquakes!

Little Earthquakes Japan

IHS Japan

GIB Norway

IHS Norway

Chaussure à son pied

Little Aardschocken

In Her Shoes - Polish

En sus Zapatos

Bueno en la Cama!

Little Earthquakes - Germany

In Her Shoes - Germany

In Her Shoes - UK

In Her Shoes - Italian

In Her Shoes - Dutch

GIB in Finnish

GIB in French

Germans love Hasselhoff and GIB:

Cannie hits Japan!:

NEW - Little Earthquakes Sweden

Cannie goes Swedish!

Cannie hits Rio!

Cannie Goes Dutch:

Polish:

Jen's Favorite Links:

All in the Family:

Throwing Things
Joe Weiner
BenderSpink

News and Media:
MediaNews
Television Without Pity

LitLife:
Moby Lives
Publisher's Weekly
Booksense
Old Hag
Beatrice
Sarah Weinman
Galley Cat
Southern Comfort

Baby Mama:
Bad Mother
Parsley

Snarkspot archives:

Copyright 2002-2008, Jennifer Weiner