Generation Ex: Tales from the Second Wives Club
My Foot is Too Big for the Glass Slipper (with Gabrielle Reece)
Big Girl in the Middle (with Gabrielle Reece)
Fiction
The Diamond Lane
Trespassers Welcome Here
For Young Adults
Minerva Clark Gets a Clue
Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs
Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost
Contents
Introduction: Whitney Otto
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Acknowledgments
Whitney Otto
KAREN AND I MET AT A PARTY. MY HUSBAND, INFANT SON, and I had recently (and impulsively) moved from San Francisco to Portland, where we knew no one, ending up at this party because the hostess was a friend of a New York friend of mine. Karen, who was standing on the other side of a kind of breakfast bar, introduced herself, and not only did I take an instant liking to her but she felt like someone I had already known a very long time in a very good way. She was funny, a writer, and close to my age with a baby only three weeks older than my five-month-old. We quickly bonded over being writers and mothers.
We exchanged numbers and in short order were spending many post-nap (the kids, not us) afternoons together, often at the zoo. The creepy bat house looms large in these memories. I should mention that none of my closest friends had kids, so I was pretty much alone in this complex, rewarding/frustrating experience, not to mention being a mother who writes, which is a whole other enchilada that only other writers can fully understand. Karen, a writer/mother herself came into my life at exactly the right moment. The fact that she was wry and unsentimental made her nearly perfect.
Not long after Karen and I met she started her novel Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me. She wrote it because she said that her biggest surprise about becoming a mother was that no one ever told you what it was really like: the emotional changes, the physical changes, the changes to your marriage, the changes to your psyche. “No one tells you that now you’ll be capable of homicide.” Or, “If I have one piece of advice for a woman looking to get pregnant, it’s train for a decathlon.” Or that those Oxfords “that look stunning on twenty-year-old waifs with thin ankles and no responsibilities … made me look like a Russian street sweeper.”
Not only were there almost no books on the reality of pregnancy and early motherhood, it seemed no one was interested in publishing any, including Karen’s publisher. G. P. Putnam’s Sons had enthusiastically published Karen’s previous novels, Trespassers Welcome Here (one of my favorite books) and The Diamond Lane (a sharp and entertaining send-up of Los Angeles), but explained to her that there was no market for a novel that dealt with the truth of motherhood. One editor said, “Mothers don’t want to read about being mothers. They want to escape from their lives. When they get a chance to read, they want to read about adventure in the Caribbean.”
However, the Motherhood Zeitgeist was looming, and Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me was one of the first books to define it. Though Amazon and Goodreads now have lists and shelves dedicated to Mommy-themed novels, Karen’s book doesn’t strictly belong in their ranks. Motherhood both defines and transcends the genre. It isn’t just a good “mommy” novel; it’s a good novel. An entertaining, funny, quotable, timeless read that you’ll be sharing with your friends, whether they have kids, or are thinking of having kids, or have no intention of having kids. No Caribbean holiday novel will ever make you laugh so much.
This novel (the original title, Nipple Confusion, was too much of a stretch for Karbo’s literary agent, who said that no male sales representative would ever try to sell a book with that title) begins with the sentence, “I am a terrible mother.” If there is a mother alive who can pass up a book that begins with the line “I am a terrible mother” I would like to meet her. I would like to be her. Karbo then launches into a razor-sharp, insightful story of friendship, pregnancy, new motherhood, and social commentary – all of it as relevant and true today as it was twenty years ago.
One of my favorite moments is when a socialite, strolling the aisles of the local upscale market, spies a baby girl saying, “Oh, my, and who have we here? Do you smile? Are you a smiler? Aren’t you a stunning brute?’”
This is what I love: the utterly ordinary interaction of a passing adult with a baby girl, then the abrupt left turn of “Aren’t you a stunning brute?” Classic Karbo.
Since the publication of Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me, Karen and I have seen each other through kids (two biological, two step), divorces (two), remarriage (one), true loves (two), deaths of fathers (two), publication of books (many for her, a few for me), and life in Portland.
“For a woman, the true advantage of marriage is not having regular sex, but having an on-site partner with whom to debrief.”
Not so surprisingly, the advantage of having Karen Karbo as a friend is exactly the same.
I AM A TERRIBLE MOTHER. I LOVE MY DAUGHTER, LOVE her so much I’m amazed I actually have to hold her in my arms, that she doesn’t just stick to my side, my heart heavy as a black hole, dense with love, trying to suck her into it. I love her like this, then, minutes later, can’t wait to get out of the house, leaving her behind. I’m told all mothers are like this, more or less, and are all wracked with guilt because of it.
The week I found out about Mary Rose, my beloved Stella Marie was six months old. She had black stick-straight-up hair, blueberry eyes that would find their way eventually to a less exotic shade of hazel, an abiding affection for the decorative moldings of our seventy-year-old house.
She liked to gaze at the corners of windows and doors, reach out as if to grab them, then wag her hands excitedly, like a palsied lady trying to open a wide-mouth jar. Her basic look was one of consternation. She was not a silly baby, even though I’d been known to make her wear a bonnet. She is perfect. The world’s cutest human. Really the world’s cutest human.
And yet, one needs a break. All I wanted to do was go to the grocery store.
“I love Stella, I’m just not interested in changing her diapers,” said Lyle, when I asked if he might watch her for an hour. Made me feel as if I was asking for the keys to the car and ten bucks for gas.
Interested in? We’re not talking a PBS documentary on marsupials here, Lyle. She’s your daughter.”
“Here’s something I read that’s kind of cool—did you know that newborn kangaroos find their way into the pouch completely unassisted by their mothers?”
“Don’t