If You Have Kids You Need This Book

All Joy No Fun by Jennifer Senior

I need to preface this with a couple caveats:

1. I’ve read a total of zero parenting books in my life. I have had quite a few recommended to me but got around to none of them.

2. I have a sixteen month-old daughter.

The reason those caveats seem significant (to me anyway) is that I want to make clear that my massive enjoyment of Jennifer Senior’s glorious All Joy and No Fun has likely more than a little to do with context. I cannot in fairness address the paucity of my background in parenting books and how that lack affected by reading of this one—might I have liked Senior’s less were it number twenty? Possibly. I’d like to think not, but perhaps. The second point’s even more critical: this is absolutely a book for parents. You know how sometimes there are books you can read for fun about topics or folks you’re not involved with, like a dude reading a book written, say, by one of the writers from Sex and the City? That sort of read can absolutely be fun, but I’d argue that this is not one of those books: this is 100% a book for parents. 100%. I don’t know what a non-parent could get from this book. I want to be clear, though: if you’re not a parent and want to read the thing, read it. If you’re thinking of having kids, read it. If you’re a grandparent, read it. All I’m trying to say is the book’s so necessary and vital for parents that part of me almost wants to protect the book from non-parents because the book’s not for spectators. It’s for those of us still navigating the unfuckingbelievably tricky course marked Modern Parenting.

I’ll posit here that this book’s glorious for a couple really profound reasons, and the first reason is the simpest to address though the toughest to notice, sometimes: it is gloriously written. All Joy and No Fun is one of the best-written books I’ve read this year (or last) period, regardless of genre or style or whatever. It’s just astonishingly well-done—it’s the sort of book where there’s a casual gloriousness on damn near every page, such as p 41, which features this: The phrase “having it all” has little to do with what women want. If anything, it’s a reflection of a widespread and misplaced cultural belief, shared by men and women alike: that we, as middle-class Americans, have been given infinite promise, and it’s our obligation to exploit every ounce of it. “Having it all” is the phrase of a culture that, as Adam Phillips implies in Missing Out, is tyrannized by the idea of its own potential. Goddamn, the smarts of that—and be appraised that Senior deploys such insight and wisdom on the regular, and that, at all times, her prose is that rarest kind, the fantastically clear and compelling sort.

What you realize, too, on coming across such bits and pieces of electrification is that All Joy and No Fun is not exclusively a parenting book—i.e. addressing basic how-tos—but is instead attempting to address what it means to be a parent at present (again, to be clear: maybe every parenting book does this, and I’m just stupid, but I don’t think that’s the case). Junior’s actually asking: what does it mean to be a parent at present, but to get at that question, there are thornier things to address as well, such as the fact that kids are at present “economically worthless but emotionally priceless,” and that we are, all of us, in a weird moment of blindness regarding the purpose of kids (if you want to useful pull-quotes, head to the WaPo or NYT reviews—lots of reviews of this book go to the same quotes, sensically, of course, and it’d feel repetitive of me to do the same).

This, friends and faithless, is the Real Deal of Junior’s book: I know of almost no books that are willing to actually use, as their premise, the question what’s the point of children. It’s a stark question, and I don’t want to imply that there isn’t a point, but, certainly, the point of kids is different now than it was even 50 years ago. Because of that shifting (which of course is ongoing), we’re living this interstitial moment, and so, in some ways, we’re open to all sorts of ideas, tiger moms or whatever else. And, of course, as anyone who’s attempted to do anything ever, if you don’t know the ultimate point or goal of something, it’s infinitely tough to muster anything like a plan regarding something (if you don’t know what you’d like for dinner, how do you go about preparing it?). We know, of course, most of the softer abstractions regarding raising children: we want them smart and healthy and respectful and engaged and etc. But abstractions are nothing like maps or rules (imagine having a friend tell you directions to his place, but, instead of giving street names, he tells you to take a left when you feel like it or to keep going as long as it feels right).

I don’t want to make it sound like all Junior’s doing is merely diagnostic, either: in the book’s six chapters, she looks at families (in Minneapolis and Houston), using their stories as jumping off points for considerations about larger notions (ch. 1′s Autonomy and 2′s Marriage and those two alone are worth the price of admission). Junior pairs these actual flesh-and-blood stories/examples with ideas from various social scientists (the ones I most resonated with were the ideas of D. Kahneman and, more than anyone, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), and this move is just huge. This part’s really important. By presenting actual stories, and then considering ideas or theories that offer some illumination on those stories, Junior actually (I’d argue) makes sensible, thoughtful parenting feel possible, and (again, at least for me) makes it easy to pause and reflect on what exactly it is we’re doing, as parents (that means nothing in general. Here’s a specific: why do I check my fucking email when I’m hanging out with my daughter? I know from experience that a year from now I’ll remember almost no emails but will remember and relish those fun moments with my daughter. So why interrupt it?). I don’t think I can quite clearly say what it is Junior’s done here, but it’s a shocking kindness, or at least that’s how I read it.

This review’s already half down a rabbit hole. Look: this is the parenting book folks are gonna be talking about for awhile for all the above reasons, plus because Junior’s had connective pieces of it in New York, where she’s an editor, and those pieces have generated their own wowser moments for readers. I don’t know what to tell you. My wife loves Curtis Sittenfeld’s work—I don’t know it—but the start of her blurb is perfect: If you’re a parent in 2013, you have to get your hands on this book. I’d update it for the next decade or so, at least. You’re an absolute fool to not have this book in your world if you have children at present.