Raising Raffi
A Book about Fatherhood (For People Who Would Never Read Such a Book)
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- £16.99
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- £16.99
Publisher Description
'Given the bedlam it describes, Raising Raffi is impressively clear-sighted, entertaining and analytical' - Financial Times
'A wise, mild and enviably lucid book about a chaotic scene' - Dwight Garner, New York Times
'Engaging, accessible, down to earth... There is much wry humour here' - James Cook, Times Literary Supplement
Keith Gessen had always assumed that he would have kids, but couldn't imagine what parenthood would be like, nor what kind of parent he would be. Then, one Tuesday night in early June, 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. 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. How do you instil 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 destructive? 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.
