Hell Is Other Parents
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Hell Is Other Parents by Deborah Copaken Kogan
I read No Exit in my early twenties, and I remember thinking hell might very well be other people, okay, sure, but under what far-fetched conditions would anyone ever actually be trapped forever in the company of strangers with no sleep or means of escape?Then I became a parent.
From Deborah Copaken Kogan, the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Shutterbabe, comes this edgy, insightful, and sidesplitting memoir about surviving in the trenches of modern parenting.
Kogan writes situation comedy in the style of David Sedaris and Spalding Gray with a dash of Erma-Bombeck-on-a-Vespa: wry, acutely observed, and often hilarious true tales, in which the narrator is as culpable as any character. In these eleven linked pieces, Kogan and her husband are almost always broke while working full-time and raising three children in New York City, one of the most expensive and competitive cities in the world.
In one episode, exhausted from a particularly difficult childbirth, Kogan finds herself sharing a hospital room with a foul-mouthed teen mother and her partying posse. In another, Kogan manages to crawl her way to her own emergency appendectomy, which inconveniently strikes the same week her infant's babysitter is away on vacation, her adolescents are off from school, her New York Times editor needs his edit, and the whole family catches the flu. And in the book's capper essay, she drives twelve hours, solo, with a screaming toddler in a rent-a-car in a futile effort to catch a glimpse of her eldest child in his summer camp play.
Yes, Shutterbabe is all grown up and slightly worse for the wear, but her clear-eyed vision while under fire has remained intact: You've never read funnier war stories.
Deborah Copaken Kogan worked as a photojournalist from 1988 to 1992, and her work was published in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, L'Express, Liberation, and Geo, among other publications. She worked in television journalism for the next six years, notably as a producer for Dateline NBC. Her work has featured in publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Times. She graduated from Harvard University. She and her three children live in New York City with her husband, Paul Kogan.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781401340810 |
| ISBN 10 | 1401340814 |
| Title | Hell Is Other Parents |
| Author | Deborah Copaken Kogan |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Hachette Books |
| Year published | 2009-08-18 |
| Number of pages | 224 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |