As Good As I Could Be
A Memoir About Raising Wonderful Children in an Imperfect World
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Having children transforms us -- by the amazing power of our love for them and theirs for us, by the anger they are able to evoke in us, and because in order to be good parents to our children, we must admit we are no longer children ourselves. In As Good as I Could Be, bestselling author Susan Cheever describes that transformation in passionate, compelling, moving prose.
Susan is raising a daughter, 18, and a son, 11; they have all survived divorce, blending families, issues at school, eating disorders, and alcoholism. They have negotiated the rocky shoals of adolescence and the teenage years with their love and respect for each other intact. Cheever describes her children as smart, kind, and connected; As Good as I Could Be is the story of how that happened.
Cheever reveals the challenges, the joys, and the heartbreaks of being a parent. Using the domestic details of her family's life, she illuminates larger truths, starting with the most basic: in order to raise happy, stable, successful children, parents can't be afraid to use their authority -- financial, emotional, and experiential; a family is not -- and should not be -- a democracy; teaching your children to celebrate their mistakes may help them to forgive you yours; and no matter how damaged or unhappy an adult's childhood was, it should not affect the way they parent their children.
Provocative, perceptive, wise, and unflinchingly honest, As Good as I Could Be is a touchstone for all parents who are doing the best they can.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Those who look to Cheever's memoirs (Home Before Dark; Note Found in a Bottle) for insights into her father, writer John Cheever, will find this book disappointing. This parenting guide-cum-memoir, based on her weekly New York Newsday columns, focuses instead on her life as a single mom bringing up two good kids her son, James, and daughter, Liley (age 10 and 18, respectively, when she completed the book) despite divorces from each of their fathers, alcoholism and a host of other problems. Cheever's honest, realistic approach to the difficulties of parenting is refreshing, as is her optimistic belief that people can be good parents despite their own unhappy childhoods. At times the book is repetitive (too many descriptions of how great her kids are). While many of her suggestions are sensible it's important to listen to our children others fall short of the mark. She denigrates the value of therapy for children, for instance, despite her own kids' problems (her son is depressed and her daughter has an eating disorder). Working parents who don't have the luxury of flex time may disagree with her blanket rejection of quality time in favor of spending more time with kids. Some essays, like the one on not worrying about what college your child gets into, seem condescending given that Liley is a freshman at Princeton. As a parenting guide, Cheever's is woefully incomplete, but at its best, it is pleasurable, not unlike whiling away a few hours with an encouraging friend, albeit one who brags too much about her kids.
