Book #70: Manhood for Amateurs

Title: Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son
Author: Michael Chabon

2009 is the year of companion memoirs about parenting in the Waldman-Chabon household. I recently reviewed Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother, and shortly after finishing that book, her husband Michael Chabon's take on parenting came through.

I'm glad I read Waldman's memoir first. It's an easy, straightforward and thought-provoking read. A good book, a book I'd like to discuss with my book club. But Chabon's book? Chabon's book is beautiful (I'll admit to a literary crush on Michael Chabon). It's not a linear book, more a series of short (sometimes as short as a page) essays and musings on his role as a man, specifically as it relates to parenthood and husbandhood and sonhood. He writes about an early sexual experience with a friend of his mother, about the props he gets for grocery shopping with his kids (when women who do the same thing aren't seen as doing anything special), about his new man purse and how much he likes it. It can be pretty random at times, but that's part of the charm. But it's also a book that only a well-regarded, seasoned writer could produce. It's a risky book for a publisher to produce, a book that an unknown, not Pulitzer Prize winning author probably wouldn't have greenlighted. So reading Manhood for Amateurs gave me greater respect for Chabon as a fiction writer, because without his great stories and memorable characters, his musings on manhood would probably sit unpublished on his hard drive in Berkeley. And that would be a great shame.