Playing House: Notes of a Reluctant Mother

by Lauren Slater

Overview

Acclaimed author Lauren Slater ruminates on what it means to be family.

Lauren Slater’s rocky childhood left her cold to the idea of ever creating a family of her own, but a husband, two dogs, two children, and three houses later, she came around to the challenges, trials, and unexpected rewards of playing house. In these autobiographical pieces, Slater presents snapshots of domestic life, populating them with the gritty details and jarring realities of sharing home, life, and body in the curious institution called “family.” She asks difficult questions and probes unsettling truths about sex, love, and parenting. In these pages, Slater introduces us to her struggles with her mother, her determination to make a home of her own, her compromises in deciding to marry (her conflicts manifesting as an affair on the eve of her wedding), her initial struggle to connect with her newborn child, and the dilemmas of mothering with a mental illness. She writes openly about her decision to abort her second pregnancy and her later decision to have a second child after all. She tells us about the searing decision to have elective double mastectomy and how her love for her husband was magically rekindled after she saw him catch fire in a chemical accident.

It’s not all mastectomies and chemical fires, though. Slater digs into the everyday challenges of family living, from buying a lemon of a car and fighting back menacing weeds to gaining weight and being jealous of the nanny. Beautifully written, often humorous, and always revealing, these stories scrutinize the complex questions surrounding family life, offering up sometimes uncomfortable truths.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807061121
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	07/14/2015
Pages:	206
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lauren Slater is the author of several books, including Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs That Changed Our Lives, The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals, Playing House: Notes of a Reluctant Mother, Welcome to My Country, and Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. Slater lives in Harvard, Massachusetts.

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Copyright © 2015 Lauren Slater.
Excerpted by permission of Beacon Press.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents
 
Preface xi
 
1 Tripp Lake 1
2 Going Solo 12
3 Paired 16
4 On Fire 24
5 Uncurling 32
6 My Life as a Father 37
7 Isosceles 46
8 Squared Off 57
9 The Other Mother 65
10 The Suit 82
11 Bilateral 89
12 Zyprexa 96
13 Shame 104
14 Sex: In Three Positions 115
15 Tongue and Groove 130
16 Boneyard 142
17 Dolled Up 156
18 The Mud Is in My Mouth 173


Acknowledgments 189

Editorial Reviews

A fiercely, lyrically honest memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews

“An extraordinary essay collection.. Her sheer bravado and willingness to lay every aspect of her personal life bare is a hallmark of her writing style, and it’s on full display in each of these pieces….A brilliant example of the resonant power of “women’s writing,” Slater’s emotional revelations will strike chords in readers unable to turn away from these difficult but sincere domestic truths. Slater’s candid collection has huge book-group appeal.” —Booklist

“…throughout these 18 essays, most of which map the difficult territory of family, sex, and aging, Slater’s voice is aggressively, even unsettlingly, candid.” —Boston Globe

“Slater weaves together a series of essays demonstrating that even the unprepared and initially unwilling may create a family life that does not go up in flames (except when fire actually does break out, in which case a redemptive moment can be seized). A marked lack of vanity permeates the author’s intensely personal yet universally resonant pieces, which cover everything from the indignities of a makeover to a wrenching decision to have an abortion.” —Library Journal, Best Books of 2013: Memoir

“The beauty of Lauren Slater’s prose is shocking. . . . Slater’s vision is, ultimately, one of unity and possibility.”—Claire Messud, Newsday

“Slater’s own zigzagging from devotion to resentment (and back) gives these essays their power. Who hasn’t felt the competing and incompatible yearnings to be a domestic goddess and at the same time an independent and self-fulfilled individual, free from the endless demands of children?”—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

From the Publisher

11/25/2013
The latest from psychologist and prolific essayist Slater (The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals) is a slender, lyrically voiced collection of her essays, written over time, comprising personal experiences with sex, self-esteem, parenting, mental illness, and childhood family dysfunction. Slater's digressive style is one of her hallmarks, as is the confessional, glass-half-full deliverance of her travails and triumphs as a wife, mother, psychologist, foster child, and cancer survivor. Many of these vignettes are bold and entertaining; some of her indulgences, such as outing publicly her lack of interest in marital sex ("I have been gripped by sex the same as the trap grips the ferret's leg and he has to bite off his limb to set himself free. What kind of fun is this?") and the details of her affair while engaged to be married, teeter precariously between too much information and bad taste. Any shortcomings are assuaged by giving readers access to keen observations of nature and human nature, and her accumulated wisdom, which provide a compelling, highly relatable narrative. The more uplifting passages depict moments of newfound personal and spiritual enlightenment, such as when she discovered a relationship between mood and self-neglect, and that her depression lessened when her physical appearance improved. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

2013-10-01
A psychologist and nonfiction writer's frank meditations on how she formed a family and learned to love the people in her life. Slater (The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals, 2012, etc.) explores how she "[came] to the task of mothering" after surviving a "brutal" childhood. Her early experiences, which included a move from her dysfunctional birth family into a foster home, shaped her into an adult for whom control, rather than personal relationships, was most important. "I wanted more than a man, a best friend, a child or talent, I wanted a home, she writes," since ownership itself represented something "magical." Despite a "brooding and acerbic and self-consumed" nature and tendencies toward obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression, Slater managed to find love, get married and have children. But she still struggled with a number of issues, including attachment. With candor and self-deprecating wit, she describes the difficulty she had bonding with her infant daughter and the lack of interest she had in sex. A driven career woman, Slater eventually grew to love domesticity. She even became an expert in carpentry, a craft that brought her closer to her husband. For all his liberality toward gender roles in the home, he could not understand that "the domestic arts [were] a combination of mindless tasks and mindful executions." Slater also discusses her fraught relationship with her own body. She talks openly about combating the frumpiness that emerged in the wake of depression as well as her elective double mastectomy surgery to eliminate the too-large breasts that also carried the genetic threat of cancer. At once revealing and disconcerting, Slater's work celebrates the endless, though not always easy, rebirths that are possible through family life. A fiercely, lyrically honest memoir.

Kirkus Reviews