I am a fan of Jim Gaffigan. I love to read. I will be a dad soon. So this new book by Jim Gaffigan on parenting (reviewed at the very good site Mockingbird) immediately caught my attention. This is a book that I will get soon.
Here is the beginning of the book review at Mockingbird:
Comedian Jim Gaffigan just wrote a book: Dad Is Fat. It’s a not-so-serious (but therefore very serious) book on parenting, and the publisher actually sent me an advanced copy to review here on Mockingbird””hence this post. (Can I just take second to revel in the fact that this is the first advanced copy I have received to review. Thanks.) The book will be released for sale tomorrow, May 7th. You can read my previous ruminations and some helpful background on Gaffigan and his comedic talentshere, but you might already know him as “œthe Hot Pockets guy.”
My overall response is that while most parenting books (i.e., how-to manuals), even the few out there for fathers, are basically works of law, Dad Is Fat is a work of grace. Parenting authors tend to objectify parents and children, speaking aboutand to them, but Gaffigan empathizes with and for us, making light of the absurdities of parenting, careful never to give us more how-to’s, instead entering the trenches with us and helping us laugh about it along the way. He does this by being deeply ironic yet self-deprecatingly honest about his own experiences as a father. Gaffigan, in other words, unmasks all the pretense and tells the truth about what’s really going on in his head and in his apartment full of children””he and his wife live in a two-bedroom Manhattan walk-up apartment with their five (!) children.