The Cursing Mommy's Book of Daysby Ian Frazier
Rating: ★★
isbn: 9780374133184
Publication Date: January 1, 2012
Pages: 244
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Farrar Straus and Giroux
Based on his widely read columns for The New Yorker, Ian Frazier's uproarious first novel, The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days, centers on a profoundly memorable character, sprung from an impressively fertile imagination. Structured as a daybook of sorts, the book follows the Cursing Mommy―beleaguered wife of Larry and mother of two boys, twelve and eight―as she tries (more or less) valiantly to offer tips on how to do various tasks around the home, only to end up on the ground, cursing, surrounded by broken glass. Her voice is somewhere between Phyllis Diller's and Sylvia Plath's: a hilariously desperate housewife with a taste for swearing and large glasses of red wine, who speaks to the frustrations of everyday life.
This book has been on my TBR for years; the title appealed to me in the moment – I’m not a mommy but I can curse with the best of them. A few months ago, I had it in hand to purge, but I read the flap and the author is a New Yorker columnist so I held it back. After reading Are We Having Fun Yet by Lucy Mangan, I thought it would be the right time to read this one as a comparison of sorts: how would the American version of the concept compare to the UK version? How would a male author’s portrayal of a columnist-working-from-home mother of two stack up against the same dynamic in the UK?
It didn’t, obviously. I wasn’t able to make it through February. But I’m not sure this is a condemnation; it’s just a very different delivery and one that ultimately didn’t suit me at all because – hilariously – of the swearing.
Do you remember the comedian Sam Kennison? For those that don’t, he was an American stand-up comedian and actor. A former Pentecostal preacher, he performed stand-up routines that were characterized by intense sudden tirades, punctuated with his distinctive scream, similar to charismatic preachers. The Screaming Mommy is the Sam Kennison of mommy diarists, and I think you have to have a certain sense of humor to appreciate it. Entire paragraphs of all-caps profanity, using f*ck as every part of speech, usually in the same sentence.
Apart from that, it’s not bad, but still didn’t work as a book; if I skipped those tirades, the narrative still failed to connect with me and frankly, I found some of it disturbingly hypocritical – like when she’s wondering why her 12-year-old son needs to be medicated to control his angry, emotional outbursts in school, as she’s smashing an entire sink full of dishes with a hammer because she tried to rinse her hands off, and the splash back from a dirty cereal bowl stained her silk blouse.
In the author’s defence, this book was based on a series of columns written for The New Yorker, and as columns, I think they’d have worked much better; outbursts like this are probably easier to chuckle over when they’re fed to the audience once a month. All together like this in book form, it’s just way too much. Lucy Mangan manages to convey the same frustration and angst in a way the reader can laugh with, rather than feeling as though they’re laughing at the crazy person who escaped the asylum, and she manages to do it with a semblance of continuing plot, or at least character, development.