How to Baby
A No-Advice-Given Guide to Motherhood, with Drawings
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- $159.00
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- $159.00
Descripción editorial
A wryly personal and deeply relatable graphic memoir skewering the “traditional” parenting book to chronicle the absurdities, frustrations, and soaring joys of new parenthood—from the acclaimed New Yorker cartoonist and author
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
How do you know if you’re ready to have a baby? How do you know if you might be pregnant? And how do you deal with peeing all the time and being hungry all the time and fielding well-meaning but kind of insulting advice and finding a doula and being dropped by your old friends and learning why it’s called mom brain and not dad brain and the tyranny of the milestones you’re not meeting and negotiating boundaries with in-laws and realizing that your heart now exists outside of your chest and in the body of this tiny little being whose entire existence depends on the quality of your care?
To tackle these questions and many others, award-winning cartoonist and memoirist Liana Finck began illustrating her early years of motherhood, giving images and language to her insecurities, frustrations, and wild joy.
In How to Baby, Liana takes her witty and lacerating cartoons (“Hobbies for Pregnant Women: Waiting on Hold with the Insurance Company”) and weaves them together with comic essays (“You Married a Brute. Worse. You’re a Nag: Go Ahead and Argue with Each Other”), handy lists (“Nesting. The Comprehensive List of What to Buy and Why Getting Things Used Is Dangerous and Unamerican”), and profound observations. Together, these brilliant pieces form an immersive and comprehensive narrative whole—a baby book, a resource, and an emotional balm—for our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New Yorker cartoonist Finck (Passing for Human) depicts her pregnancy, childbirth, and early parenthood in the form of a facetious guidebook with no definitive answers or advice but plenty of gentle snark. Spindly, abstracted female figures illustrate wry observations on such topics as the physical changes of pregnancy ("Is your bladder in on the sexist conspiracy that relegates women to the home?"), dealing with "In-Laws and Other Invaders" ("The walls of your home will dematerialize"), and figuring out baby products ("To my knowledge, there is no way to use a boppy pillow"). Finck's illustrations sometimes expand into striking expressionism; a pregnant woman's body is first depicted stuffed with random objects, then as a cage containing a baby, then as an enormous baby's head. She touches lightly but acerbically on political issues surrounding childbirth and childcare, including the infuriating bureaucracy of the American healthcare system (pretending to be a patient on hold with insurance is "good practice for parenthood"), the uneven gendered division of labor, and the isolation new mothers face. Parents will find plenty here that's both familiar and funny, and all of it presented with a refreshing lack of judgement.
