Sweeney, former cast member of Saturday Night Live (1990-1994) and creator of the androgynous character "Pat", takes readers on an intimate and humorous journey through her satisfying and occasionally messy family life. Married and now living outside of Chicago, Sweeney depicts the tribulations of adopting a baby girl from China and her life as a single-mother. With timing true to her comedic roots, she meanders delightfully through past histories, recounting her years in Los Angeles, her twenty-five year high school reunion, and the assortment of men she dated. Sweeney tackles a myriad of touchy topics with candor and bigheartedness. Any subject is fair game. Whether describing the long search for the right nanny for her daughter, her intense dislike of big strollers which she describes as "super-wide, almost Hummer-like in their obnoxiousness, a veritable trailer for their precious cargo," or the death of her beloved brother, Sweeney plunges right in. "Okay. Let me stop this lightly comic, chatty memoir and brings things to a dead stop. Emphasis on dead. My brother Bill died yesterday." Sweeney's devilish sense of humor successfully makes the transition to the page, linking the scenes of her life as daughter, sister, wife, and mother into a delightful whole. (Apr.)
If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother
Narrated by Julia Sweeney
Julia SweeneyUnabridged — 6 hours, 39 minutes
If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother
Narrated by Julia Sweeney
Julia SweeneyUnabridged — 6 hours, 39 minutes
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Overview
Since her time on Saturday Night Live, where she created the infamous androgynous character "Pat," Julia Sweeney has gone on to establish herself as a witty, captivating performer of one-woman shows, like God Said Ha!, In the Family Way, and Letting Go of God. She gave a TED talk sharing how she explained the birds and the bees to her eight-year-old daughter, Mulan, which ignited an incredible response. Now, when it comes to talking about motherhood, people want to hear what Julia has to say. If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother is her compilation of stories, revealing her painfully funny adventures and her poignant personal story of deciding to adopt as a single woman, her transition to traditional family after she married and took on the new role of at-home mother, and her insightful open-eyed wonder at the whole concept of motherhood for herself and others, too.
From being mistaken as her daughter's grandmother to her theory that people who can't make friends often resort to making children, Julia imparts a cutting edge, contemporary take on parenting, displaying a definite appreciation for the absurd. Poignant, provocative, and wise, Julia writes about parenting as only she can, laying out her mother-daughter experiences with religion, nannies, pets, schools, and much more.
A joy to listen to, this is one of the most amusing, and at times powerful, modern books on parenting.
Editorial Reviews
"What a gift! If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother is an intimate and hilarious book that will leave you resenting your mother less, hugging your children tighter, and glowing with gratitude that Julia Sweeney has put it all into words."
Reading If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother gave me the delightful sensation of being Julia Sweeney’s best friend. I curled up in bed with this book and we shared secrets, swapped parenting fiascos and boyfriend dramas, complained about our mothers, laughed a lot, cried a little, and just generally had an awesome time. Write another book soon, Ms. Sweeney! Legions of your friends are waiting!
"This is the sort of book that made me want to be the person who wrote it. Pithy, painful and very, very funny."
"Sweeney takes life’s quotidian rituals to hilarious heights."
"I am hereby breaking my vow to not write any more blurbs because...it's Julia Sweeney! In my opinion, any new creative offering from Julia Sweeney, no matter what the medium, is a cause for celebration because she is such a spectacular combination of insightful, hilarious and honest. So, yay! A new book from Julia Sweeney! Drinks are on me!"
"Funny, funny stuff . . . clever and quirky . . . she exhibits that rare ability as a writer to make the ordinary seem interesting."
"Julia Sweeney can you make you laugh about anything. . . . Wry and honest."
"A deep, candid, insightful, and emotional look at love, family, independence, and commitment....Reading it is like catching up through a long, soul-baring night with your funniest old friend."
"A former SNL cast member leaves fame behind, moving to the Midwest and adopting a Chinese girl, in this endearing series of true tales from parenthood's front lines."
"What a delicious treat! Julia Sweeney is one of the truest, warmest, wittiest voices in the world today, and we're so lucky that she spent her precious alone-time (while her husband and daughter were away) writing a book that invites everyone into her heart and home."
"A thoughtful set of essays on motherhood embroidered with humor . . . As you'd expect, there's humor here, but it's also a deeper read about relationships and the unpredictability of life."
"Frank, funny."
"Outlandishly funny . . . For every mother who could use a laugh—in other words, every mother—If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother offers a touch of wisdom and plenty of wit."
"A deep, candid, insightful, and emotional look at love, family, independence, and commitment....Reading it is like catching up through a long, soul-baring night with your funniest old friend."
"Sweeney takes life’s quotidian rituals to hilarious heights."
"Frank, funny."
"A thoughtful set of essays on motherhood embroidered with humor . . . As you'd expect, there's humor here, but it's also a deeper read about relationships and the unpredictability of life."
11/15/2013
Sweeney (Saturday Night Live, 1990–94) shares her experience with and musings on becoming an adoptive mother to a 17-month-old Chinese girl. Forgoing the traditional route of marriage and pregnancy, she decided to take matters into her own hands and adopt a child by herself after considering the question: "What did I have, biologically, to pass on that was so important? My Irish heritage with its tendency toward alcoholism and depression?" Throughout are snippets from Sweeney reminiscing about her own childhood ("Turns out, my childhood was probably not nearly as bad as I once thought it was. In fact, my newly revised attitude about my mother is that she did the best she could"), and her sharp humor shines through. VERDICT While there is no shortage of celebrity-parent tales, singles looking to adopt will find inspiration along with the giggles. Purchase for demand.
With her husband abroad on business and her daughter away at camp, Sweeney found herself alone at home (except for the cat and the dog) with time to reflect on her family. Her story deftly weaves between the present day and her childhood. As a young comedienne and writer in Los Angeles, she had a brief marriage that ended in divorce, followed by a number of boyfriends (whom she recalls as Joe #1, #2, etc.). In her later 30s, after a bout with cancer (God Said, “Ha”), she realized that she wanted to be a mother. She recounts the experience of adopting her Chinese daughter, Tara Mulan (“no, not because of the movie”) and the struggles with nannies, strollers, playdates, and urban public schools that followed. She was introduced to her current husband, Michael, via an email from his brother, saying that she ought to be his wife. The brother (-in-law) was right. Julia, Mulan, and Michael became a family. Life in suburban Chicago has challenges—not only the weather but also being taken for Mulan’s grandmother by the ponytailed, preppy women in the neighborhood. Sweeney’s narration makes listening to the personal material even more intimate. Her interview with her mother-in-law about having an abortion in the late 1950s is candid and poignant. Sweeney’s explanation of the facts of life to nine-year-old Mulan is side-splittingly funny.
Verdict Recommended for all popular collections.—Nann Blaine Hilyard, Zion-Benton P.L., Zion, IL
(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Comic Julia Sweeney performs her insightful and hilarious memoir about family, parenting, and coping with the baggage of past and present relationships. Her vocal performance embraces the triumphs, tragedies, and joys that unfolded as her life evolved from “Saturday Night Live” to motherhood in suburbia. She delivers her adventures with humor, providing unique perspectives on the absurdities of romance, mother-daughter relationships, pets, nannies, schools, the adoption process, and coping. Her comedic flair ranges from deft accents to tour-de-force caricatures. The chapters flow like those of a novel—each one peppered with Sweeney's acerbic wit and edgy take on her new life. A.W. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
A funny look at being an adoptive parent. Former Saturday Night Live comedian Sweeney brings comic relief to yet another celebrity memoir on adopting and raising a family. After numerous unsuccessful relationships, the author decided she didn't need a man in order to have a child; she planned to adopt and find a husband later. She gathered her energy and applied to receive a Chinese girl, entering into motherhood much "like a golden retriever running after a ball." Sweeney was hooked on motherhood, but years later, when opportunity opened up an extended window of alone time--no child, no husband--the author was "giddy" with excitement. She reveled in the down time and spent her four weeks writing this memoir, which reminisces about her childhood, finding a suitable nanny during her daughter's childhood, her failed relationships and life as a working mother (the author has written several one-woman shows). Her thoughts swirled around the complexities of educating her daughter about human anatomy and sex: "it's like having a waste treatment plant right next to an amusement park. Terrible zoning….Like your nose and your mouth…they're both close to each other on your face, but you wouldn't stick a bean sprout up your nose." Sweeney also explores same-sex marriage, immigration, prejudices, death and dogs, and she pays homage to her own mother, aunts and friends who are parents, all the while wobbling on the tightrope of allowing her child to become her own person while influencing her in subtle but significant ways. Laugh-out-loud moments blended with honesty and despondency.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170916788 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 04/02/2013 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother
Because the pillow that I dream on [is] a threshold of a world I can’t ignore.
—Silver Jews, “My Pillow Is the Threshold”
First things first: Let me bring you in the house, which, you may notice, is quite old by American standards. It’s located in Wilmette, Illinois. It has a history, this house. It used to be the Village Hall and was originally built in 1878. This house was in existence when the Battle of Little Bighorn was going on, a mere thousand miles to the west. Why this fact is meaningful to me, I’m not exactly sure. But this house—the door frames, the old plaster on the walls of the front rooms, the staircase banister—it links me in time to history, however humbly.
My house sits near the wee town center, which has a train station; in just twenty-eight minutes you can be in downtown Chicago. Michael and I bought this house nearly four years ago, after we married. Mulan and I moved from Los Angeles, moving in with Michael, who was already living a mile from here. We pasted ourselves together and formed a family. When I saw this house for the first time, I had that Brigham Young—like sensation: this is the place. I was in love at first sight, but I pretended to consider other houses, like dating around before you get married to the person you know you’ll marry. This house and I were meant for each other. We both knew it. Plus, like Brigham Young, I was really tired and wanted to stop.
The house has been remodeled many times over the years, but the front part of the house is the oldest part. There’s a guest room just to the right of the front door. In the guest room we have an antique double bed and we call it the “grandma room.” This is because it’s often used by Michael’s mother, Norma, or my mother, Jeri, when they visit.
On the bed is a decorative pillow. My mother gave this pillow to me about seventeen years ago—when I was single, living in Los Angeles, and not yet a mother. She had come to visit, and as she bent over her suitcase to unpack, she exclaimed, “I brought you the most hysterical thing!” I was a little frightened. Past experience taught me that the object would not, in fact, be hysterical.
Then I watched as she took a small, navy blue pillow out of her suitcase. She was already laughing. The pillow had a phrase embroidered on top: IF IT’S NOT ONE THING, IT’S YOUR MOTHER.
I immediately hated the pillow for two reasons. One was that it was a play on an old catchphrase, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” Gilda Radner’s character on Saturday Night Live Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say that phrase, after she said, “It’s always something.” The association with Saturday Night Live was slightly irritating because I’d just left that very show, and although my departure was on friendly terms I was feeling slightly wounded. However, many people—I think perhaps my mother is included in this group—assumed that as a former cast member I must love anything even slightly associated with SNL, and I feared that this was part of her assumption when buying that pillow.
The second thing I hated was the rhyming pun (as a rule I do not like those), in which the key word was mother, meaning that it was, of course, all about my mother. I thought, the pillow may as well have been embroidered with MY MOTHER IS A FIRST-CLASS NARCISSIST AND ALL I GOT OUT OF IT WAS THIS STUPID PILLOW.
Come to think of it, there was a third reason I hated the pillow, the true objection at the root of it all. It was that the pillow indicated to whoever gazed upon it that my mother and I conversed in a casual yet intimate repartee of mutual ribbing, a jovial “You drive me crazy but I still love you” kind of thing. I felt that my mother and I did not have that kind of relationship.
My mother held the pillow out toward me and I smiled, forcefully.
“Isn’t it hysterical?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said flatly. “Hysterical.”
As soon as my mother left town I put the pillow into a closet. It only emerged when she came for a visit; I’d prop it up on the guest room bed ahead of her arrival. A few years and several visits went by. One spring, my mother came to visit. She looked affectionately at the pillow. “That pillow is really just so funny,” she said. Then she glanced at me, encouraging me to agree.
“Eh . . . ,” I said.
“Oh,” my mother replied, stung by my lack of enthusiasm. “Well, if you don’t like it, get rid of it.” She picked up the pillow and pressed it against her breast. Her head looked like a flower emerging from the square shape, her neck and face tilted slightly to one side. A tablespoon of liquid guilt dripped into my lower abdomen.
“No, I sort of like it,” I meekly offered.
“Oh good!” My mother sighed, relieved.
Years went by. I became a mother myself. The guest room in L.A. became my daughter’s room, and the closet where the pillow was kept became my daughter’s closet. One day, when Mulan was about four years old, I was cleaning out her closet and I came upon the pillow.
Suddenly, without warning, a flood of emotion came over me. I realized with a start that this pillow really was hysterical. I laughed out loud and thought, This pillow needs to be on my daughter’s bed. Anyone who walks in is going to laugh.
With a thud, I understood that I’d been much, much too hard on my mother. She wasn’t a narcissist! We really did have a casual intimacy that included mutual ribbing. Just like I did, and would continue to have, with my own daughter as she grew older. Of course!
So the pillow’s new home was on Mulan’s bed. And I was right: anyone who came over and toured around the house laughed when they saw it. “Where did you get that?” they would ask. “My mother!” I would say. We would both giggle. See, the humor would escalate.
My daughter grew and years passed. When Mulan was six she came to me with the pillow.
“I don’t want this on my bed anymore,” she said.
“Why?” I asked, adding, “It’s hysterical.”
“No,” Mulan said. “It’s not. I don’t even get it.”
I said, “Well, it’s a play on the phrase ‘If it’s not one thing, it’s another.’ Like if many bad things are happening to you, or like if one bad thing goes away in your life and then another one pops up.”
“That’s terrible,” Mulan said.
“Yes,” I said. “So this pillow takes that phrase, and substitutes the word mother for another. Like your ‘mother’ is another bad thing that happens to you.”
It dawned on me that I was clearly not a bad thing happening to her. At least not yet; I mean, she was only six. In a way, her not getting the joke was a compliment.
Mulan said, “I just don’t like it. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but it’s not funny to me. I don’t want this pillow in my room.” Then she added this, just to twist the knife a little: “You wouldn’t want me to have something I really didn’t like in my room, would you?”
I say “twist the knife” because one thing I want my daughter to be is able to defy and be independent of me, her mother; unlike me, who cowers and does whatever my mother says or wants most of the time. I suppose I have succeeded in cultivating this quality in Mulan, as she has it in spades, and she emphasizes her independence and different opinions constantly. I have vowed to gulp and bear it.
At this point, Mulan sighed wearily at me, indicating that in fact, I was not a totally good thing in her life. Which made me think, “Well, if that was true, why wasn’t that pillow funny?”
Then, I realized: clearly the funniness of this pillow does not become apparent until one actually becomes a mother, and the pillow, resting on one’s offspring’s chair or bed, demonstrates its comic value to all.
My mission was suddenly clear and straightforward: I had to keep this pillow until Mulan did, in fact, think it was funny. That would only occur if Mulan became a mother herself. The pillow went back in the closet.
Through several dramatic reductions of clutter and even a marriage and a move across country, I’ve held on to that pillow. I think of the pillow now like an insect, the cicada. Here, in the Midwest, there is a species of cicada whose larvae live underground. Depending on the species, they bide their time for thirteen to seventeen years. Then they metamorphose as flying adults into the light of day. I feel the pillow is like the cicada—just biding its time, waiting to be funny again.
But then, a little over a year ago, here in Illinois, I came across the pillow in a basement closet and moved it to the guest room bed. The grandmothers come and go, and the guest room is often empty. But the pillow has found a home in this room.
At this very moment our dog, Arden, is draped over the pillow on the bed. He’s an Australian cattle hound, about fifty pounds. His paws cradle the pillow and under his bloodshot eyes you can just read the word mother. It’s hard not to sigh and linger in the doorway when he looks at me like that.
But, let’s go down the hallway and sit together at the family room dining table. I will make us some tea. As you can see, the table has a knitting project on it. Let me explain: Mulan became determined to learn how to knit a couple of years ago. She badgered. Let’s take a class. It’ll be so much fun. I resisted. My resolve began to unravel. When Mulan became determined to knit, it seemed predetermined somehow. Of course I would have a daughter who wanted to knit. Maybe on some subconscious level she understands that the story of our trajectory toward each other has knitting in Act 1.
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