Started on 4.20.25, finished on 4.24.25

A person would have to have some really spectacularly unique insights in order to write an interesting book about the first three years of a normal child’s normal life. This book gets there a handful of times, but for me, it’s not enough to make the book interesting or enjoyable enough to recommend.

That said, as I was slogging through, I suddenly realized that it was written before the age of mommy blogging, which made me wonder if perhaps the book was a bit more revelatory when it came out. I think it’s a pretty difficult book to enjoy from where I’m sitting—parenting is far more demystified in the culture, and we’ve seen videos online of basically every cute thing a child might do. I was able to muster up a little more goodwill for the book after I had this realization.

Even with that extra goodwill, though, the book was pretty dull to me overall, and there were also some parts that really irked me. There were a few things toward the beginning with the birth story and nursing details that really felt like they belonged more to the mother and reasonably could have been left out of this book, which is supposed to be solely the father’s account of things.

There’s a point in the book where he armchair-diagnoses his friends’ kid, and to me, his descriptions of his other friends’ kid read as very ungenerous throughout the book. I wonder how those two sets of parents reacted to these descriptions. In a particularly eyeroll-inducing paragraph, he describes how he refused to say “poop,” and though his wife warned him, he didn’t realize it was a mistake until the first time Madeleine said “shit.”

There were many good moments, too—some very sweet observations, fun descriptions of many books I remember from childhood, and many pages (perhaps a few too many) about the cute early-talking phase. I wouldn’t recommend this book overall, but I do think it has some merit, and I could understand it having more cultural relevance when it was initially released.

Click here to buy this book on Bookshop.org

My favorite quotes:

“In one of those ecstasies that seem entirely reasonable to the parent but are powerfully emetic to everyone else …”

“In a sense all books are flap books, because pages themselves are flaps”

“He would swing anything swingable to see what would happen when it hit anything hittable.”

“When I carried her off, she called back ‘Kuss?’ and I had to explain that the cashier or the salesman or the mechanic did indeed think she was wonderful, but was perhaps too busy to give her a kiss.”

“On hearing the phoneme bye (‘time to say goodbye’; ‘perhaps we should drop by’; ‘I think he might be bi’), she would start industriously blowing kisses”

“Adolescence is almost nothing but trying on different roles, each one coming to us complete with costume, posture, and prescribed lines, and we gradually play one role more than the others, then play it exclusively, and last of all adjust it here and there, but in relatively minor ways, so that, as professional clowns must do, we eventually have a costume and routine that is unique to us, but only barely.”