I love this new genre of books written by mothers – often middle-aged ones – that tell the nitty gritty truth of what it’s actually like to make, birth, and raise tiny humans in today’s world. Spoiler alert: not easy. In this collection of essays, Jessi Klein explodes the cult of silence that has surrounded some of the “shameful” parts of being a mother in extraordinary fashion. She pulls not a single punch, and they land squarely in the nose of all the stereotypes about mothers and motherhood.
If you are reading this and you are a mother, there will be some things you will recognize in the very depths of your (tired) soul that Klein brings out into the open. She discusses how motherhood is as challenging as any traditionally male “hero’s journey,” except that rather than leaving home to seek adventure and danger in far-flung locales, motherhood offers the same opportunities within our own homes and beings. And I fully agree. I’ve been through some shit in life. Nothing I had been through prepared me even remotely for the challenges of motherhood. And there are so many different parts of it that are all as hard as one another. In this book Klein brutally shares some of these parts. How difficult labour and recovery is (you will come to know what an “underwear sandwich” is and share her outrage at the fact that no one knows what this is until they’ve already given birth and need to make them). How impossible it feels, after just expelling a human from your body and dealing with the nuclear holocaust of hormones coursing through your body and zero sleep, to learn how to care for a baby when our society rarely teaches us all the “secrets” and “tricks.” How, while our job is to keep our tiny humans safe, sometimes the greatest threat to them is… ourselves. Because motherhood will bring you to breaking point, and it will do so repeatedly. How the person you were before you had a baby will just be *poof* gone once you become a mom, a fact that will take you quite some time to realize and be followed by an extensive grieving period and possibly some strange follow-up fashion choices. And there is so much more here.
If you can’t tell, I loved this book. I felt it deep, deep in my wounded mom soul. It is hard. It is a battleground. It is full of self-doubt, self-recrimination and self-blame. You will never feel like you’re doing it right because guess what? There is no “right.” But you will feel like there is, only it’s not whatever you’re doing. You’ll have moments when you deeply regret whatever crazy impulse made you decide to become a parent, you will hate your partner and fantasize about a wonderful life far, far away from the crowded supermarket parking lot you’ve been circling for half an hour in pyjamas looking for a parking spot. You’ll miss sleep, time to yourself, freedom, and most of all the person you used to be. It’s not for the faint at heart, and the fact that moms are so completely and totally overlooked and taken for granted in our culture does not change the fact that actually being a mom is an incredible feat of strength and determination. This book captures all of this.
It also, however, captures the flip side. The side that does get discussed, as well it should. The one where for every moment we feel like we are losing our minds, every time we snap and lose our shit, every sleepless night, we get countless moments of pure love and adoration for these tiny beings who have managed to completely tear apart our lives, but who have also made us into the strong, courageous, completely insane mothers we now are. How much it’s all worth it, a thousand times over. I love books that show all of this messiness of motherhood, and allow all of these different aspects to coexist in the same person at the same time. Because that’s exactly what it feels like from the inside, and it’s an amazing journey. It would be helpful, though, if we went into it just a little more prepared. Then we could, at the very least, enjoy wearing jeans that don’t have a stretchy waistband, enjoy being able to have cereal for dinner with zero guilt, enjoy showers and sleep ins a little more before it all goes away quite suddenly!
An instant New York Times bestseller, I’ll Show Myself Out is the eagerly anticipated second essay collection from Jessi Klein, author of the acclaimed debut You’ll Grow Out of It.
Longlisted for the PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
“Sometimes I think about how much bad news there is to tell my kid, the endlessly long, looping CVS receipt scroll of truly terrible things that have happened, and I want to get under the bed and never come out. How do we tell them about all this? Can we just play Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire and then brace for questions? The first of which should be, how is this a song that played on the radio?”
In New York Times bestselling author and Emmy Award-winning writer and producer Jessi Klein’s second collection, she hilariously explodes the cultural myths and impossible expectations around motherhood and explore the humiliations, poignancies, and possibilities of midlife.
In interconnected essays like “Listening to Beyoncé in the Parking Lot of Party City,” “Your Husband Will Remarry Five Minutes After You Die,” “Eulogy for My Feet,” and “An Open Love Letter to Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent,” Klein explores this stage of life in all its cruel ironies, joyous moments, and bittersweetness.
Written with Klein’s signature candor and humanity, I’ll Show Myself Out is an incisive, moving, and often uproarious collection. – Goodreads
Book Title: I’ll Show Myself Out
Author: Jessi Klein
Series: No
Edition: Audiobook
Published By: Harper
Released: July 14, 2017
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir, LGBTQ+, Self-discovery, Nature
Pages: 320
Date Read: May 16-17, 2024
Rating: 8/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 3.83/5 (119 ratings)
