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catherine_the_greatest 's review for:
Parts of this memoir are very, very funny.
I literally LOLed while reading the chapter "Evening at the Improv." My 6-year-old demanded that I tell him what was so funny. Unfortunately, we were in a waiting room at the time, so I told him it wasn't appropriate. Once we got home I read the entire chapter about Magary coaxing his then-3-year-old daughter to take baths by telling her butt jokes. Jokes about sticking things up one's bum are always entertaining. Magary telling his daughter that she shouldn't share the jokes with her mom because their humor is "too sophisticated" totally sounds like something that would happen in my house, except it would be me telling the boys that Grandma won't appreciate our sophisticated humor.
I also enjoyed Magary's commentary on playgrounds as a breeding ground for anarchy, the horror of lice, and the delicate balance between letting kids do things themselves and maintaining parental sanity. Some of his anecdotes fell flat, making me squirm while reading -- sometimes in sympathy and sometimes because his full disclosure humor was just TMI.
And then there are the parts that are not funny, because they're not supposed to be funny, like the story of his third child being born prematurely with serious complications. The two halves of this story bookend the memoir, with stories of his first two children wedged between. It was an odd structural choice to me. Including the story of his DUI in the middle also seemed like a strange choice to me. While it happened after he became a father, and did affect his family in some ways, it wasn't really about parenthood, and didn't fit the mood of the rest of the book.
I literally LOLed while reading the chapter "Evening at the Improv." My 6-year-old demanded that I tell him what was so funny. Unfortunately, we were in a waiting room at the time, so I told him it wasn't appropriate. Once we got home I read the entire chapter about Magary coaxing his then-3-year-old daughter to take baths by telling her butt jokes. Jokes about sticking things up one's bum are always entertaining. Magary telling his daughter that she shouldn't share the jokes with her mom because their humor is "too sophisticated" totally sounds like something that would happen in my house, except it would be me telling the boys that Grandma won't appreciate our sophisticated humor.
I also enjoyed Magary's commentary on playgrounds as a breeding ground for anarchy, the horror of lice, and the delicate balance between letting kids do things themselves and maintaining parental sanity. Some of his anecdotes fell flat, making me squirm while reading -- sometimes in sympathy and sometimes because his full disclosure humor was just TMI.
And then there are the parts that are not funny, because they're not supposed to be funny, like the story of his third child being born prematurely with serious complications. The two halves of this story bookend the memoir, with stories of his first two children wedged between. It was an odd structural choice to me. Including the story of his DUI in the middle also seemed like a strange choice to me. While it happened after he became a father, and did affect his family in some ways, it wasn't really about parenthood, and didn't fit the mood of the rest of the book.