It's a Boy!

No, no, no, I'm not having another baby (much as E wishes I would). I'm embarked on a much easier and more temporary task: blogging about the remarkable Andi Buchanan's new book, It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons, as today's stop on her fabulous Blog Book Tour (the problem with a BLOG book tour is that I don't get to have a long discussion with Andi about what she's going to wear before her reading, and then sit around and gossip with her after her reading, but I digress) (then again, I always digress) (and if you want to digress away from this post altogether, you can go read an interview with Andi about the book, or you can just say the hell with the book and go read Andi's blog--oops, except the blog is all about the book these days, but you should read it anyway!).

But let's talk about me, since this is my blog (I know you're wondering how I'm going to make this about me since I am most definitely not a woman writer raising a son, but just watch me). I am heavily into life writing: memoirs, letters, diaries, personal essays. Though it's something of a cliche, I think this interest stems from The Diary of Anne Frank, a book I read obsessively throughout my later childhood and early adolescence, imagining myself as Anne, in both the excitement of hiding and the horror of capture. My identification with Anne was so profound that I assumed everyone shared it. But at some point I started asking my friends, mainly Jewish women, like myself, and it turned out that a lot of them had no identification with Anne whatsoever, and in fact their experience of reading The Diary was one of profound disidentification. That is, the book engaged them (or, in some cases, didn't) not because Anne was so like them and they could affirm a shared identity, but because she was so different from them and they could affirm their independent identities apart from her experience (this may, in fact, be a healthier response to Anne Frank than my own, but this is not about Anne Frank, so I'll leave it at that).

What does Anne Frank have to do with It's a Boy? While many critics and book reviewers argue that we read memoirs and personal essays because we identify with their authors, I think disidentification is just as much of a draw. Perhaps blogs can be a good example.

OK, there was a whole bunch of non-typing between the previous sentence and this one in which I realized that blogs are not a good example: while I like Dawn's blog because she is a bookish, liberal, feminist, Jewish mom like me, I don't share her investment in adoption; and while I read Rob to understand what it's like to raise a "broken" child, an experience I don't have, we do share basic politics, as well as a deep commitment to our children.

More non-typing, but I think this is going to work, though it will lead me to my point down a different route than I expected.

I thought that reading It's a Boy was going to be a fascinating excursion into alien territory, an experience in readerly disidentification, as it were. I know nothing about raising boys: about penises and turning sticks into guns and teenagers with hair on their faces, god forbid. And I learned about those things from reading the book, and it was fascinating. But what I also realized is how much of all motherhood is about figuring out these alien little beings we are stuck with, who are at once as familiar as our own bodies and as bizarrely unknown as prehistoric giraffes. If you have a boy, you have a certain framework for understanding him as alien: he is not like you. But that only takes you so far, and then you have to account for him as himself. Just as I have to account for M and E as themselves, even though they are bright, bookish, little Jewish girls like me. In other words, even as It's a Boy set me up for disidentification, it also inspired a more meta identification, and a realization that of course I could have mothered a boy, for it all comes down to mothering, and that I know something about.

So go buy Andi's book! And read it! And give it to your friends for Hanukkah! Or Thanksgiving! And if enough people buy it then maybe Andi will come visit me and we can talk about clothes and gossip and mothering to our heart's content!