Raising Raffi
The First Five Years
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
“A wise, mild and enviably lucid book about a chaotic scene.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Memoirs of fatherhood are rarely so honest or so blunt.” —Daniel Engber, The Atlantic
“An instant classic.” —M. C. Mah, Romper
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY LIT HUB & THE MILLIONS
An unsparing, loving account of fatherhood and the surprising, magical, and maddening first five years of a son’s life
“I was not prepared to be a father—this much I knew.”
Keith Gessen was nearing forty and hadn’t given much thought to the idea of being a father. He assumed he would have kids, but couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be a parent, or what kind of parent he would be. Then, one Tuesday night in early June, the distant idea of fatherhood came careening into view: Raffi was born, a child as real and complex and demanding of his parents’ energy as he was singularly magical.
Fatherhood is another country: a place where the old concerns are swept away, where the ordering of time is reconstituted, where days unfold according to a child’s needs. Whatever rulebooks once existed for this sort of thing seem irrelevant or outdated. Overnight, Gessen’s perception of his neighborhood changes: suddenly there are flocks of other parents and babies, playgrounds, and schools that span entire blocks. Raffi is enchanting, as well as terrifying, and like all parents, Gessen wants to do what is best for his child. But he has no idea what that is.
Written over the first five years of Raffi’s life, Raising Raffi examines the profound, overwhelming, often maddening experience of being a dad. Gessen traces how the practical decisions one must make each day intersect with some of the weightiest concerns of our age: What does it mean to choose a school in a segregated city? How do you instill in your child a sense of his heritage without passing on that history’s darker sides? Is parental anger normal, possibly useful, or is it inevitably authoritarian and destructive? How do you get your kid to play sports? And what do you do, in a pandemic, when the whole world seems to fall apart? By turns hilarious and poignant, Raising Raffi is a story of what it means to invent the world anew.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Russian American novelist Gessen (All the Sad Young Literary Men) renders the daunting frontier of new parenthood with tenderness and humility in these eloquent essays about rearing his first child. In "Home Birth," he recounts the rush of self-doubt that came when he and his partner, writer Emily Gould, found out they were expecting: "How was I going to make sure the baby didn't interfere with my work?" Instead, when his son Raffi was born, Gessen writes in "Zero to Two" that his new job became obsessively monitoring Raffi's breathing and "looking up the colors of his poops online." This seriocomic tone infuses most of the book as Gessen recounts the joys of "mundane and significant" moments like reconnecting with his roots by teaching Raffi Russian ("our own private language"), diving into the world of picture books ("Seuss... turned out to be a real piece of work"), and becoming humbled when the Covid-19 pandemic forced him and his wife to become de facto pre-K teachers at home. Together these meditations coalesce to movingly convey the beauty of ceding control, despite how messy things get. As Gessen concedes, "When your baby is born, you think you... are going to be a certain kind of parent. It's all a fantasy." New parents will find no shortage of laughs, cries, and solace here.
