Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me Read online

  Praise for Karen Karbo

  Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me

  •A New York Times Notable Book

  Is there any aspect to being a mom—stretch marks, fat sagging over the top of the elastic waistband, baby spit-up everywhere—that Erma Bombeck hasn’t already trampled into the ground? Fortunately, yes. Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me should be clutched to the “corn-silo-sized” breasts of every new mother.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

  If Carrie Fisher wrote with depth as well as wit, she would probably turn out to be Karen Karbo.

  THE SEATTLE TIMES

  The subject of pregnancy and motherhood so easily lends itself to laughter, though it has taken a novel as good as Karbo’s to remind us of that fact. But the beauty of her book is that underneath the lightness is a deeper, moving truth that never lapses into sentimentality. She’s our Erma Bombeck—a funny, uncensored chronicler of what happens after the fairy tale ends and life begins.

  WHITNEY OTTO, author of Eight Girls Taking Pictures

  In order to transcend the monolithic mommy story you have to reach down in there and wrestle it away from the mouth of American culture. Karen Karbo’s Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me does the hard work of giving our bodies and lives back to us. If you are any kind of mother, like me, or if your own mother is part of your life story, read this book. I wish Dr. Spock would have.

  LIDIA YUKNAVITCH, author of The Chronology of Water

  Karbo (The Diamond Lane) is at her best writing tongue-in-cheek riffs on sports and modern life and manages a successful marriage of the two in her sassy, satirical new novel. (She) relishes her characters’ war stories of pregnancy and labor; the novel, without taking itself too seriously, proves in its cheeky details a fun (and accurate) sendup of the timeless trials of womanhood.

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me is a funny, wise novel about more than simply gender. Karbo uses her wonderful narrative voice and her penetrating wit to find her way to the universal secrets of the self.

  ROBERT OLEN BUTLER, author of A Small Hotel

  [A] witty and astringent take on motherhood, crackles with insights and humor.

  KIRKUS REVIEWS

  Brilliant! The righteous, thoroughly American Karen Karbo delivers a swift kick in the kegels to those sappy What to Expect When You’re Expecting moms in her funny and appallingly honest novel Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me.

  VANITY FAIR

  Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life

  I want to make wallpaper out of this original and beautiful book just so I can have Karbo’s unparalleled wit and wisdom always on hand.

  CHERYL STRAYED, author of Wild

  [A]nyone with even the slightest interest in cooking and pop culture may find it hard to resist this series of epigrammatic guidelines for living large, especially when they come from a master at doing just that.

  THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

  Karbo’s Kick Ass books follow a unique structural blend of biography and advice-giving. When you read Julia Child Rules, you not only learn more about Julia’s fascinating life, you come away feeling as though you can be a little bit like Julia too.

  GLAMOUR

  A lighthearted trek through a food icon’s life, studded with satisfying tips for modern living.

  KIRKUS REVIEWS

  This intriguing book is about how Julia Child became an icon, and Karbo attributes Child’s success to her unique view on life. Here, through a fun and engaging set of rules, Karbo instructs readers on how they can follow Julia’s example and find true joy in life, too.

  FOREWORD REVIEWS

  Karbo’s joyful take on the ebullient, self-described “California hayseed” will charm readers new to the twists and turns of Child’s life, as well as devoted fans.

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  Julia Child Rules is a blast.

  HEADBUTLER

  Out of all the other Julia Child literature that’s out there, Karbo succeeds in pointing out something that should be, but isn’t always, obvious to us: the way Julia lived life with abandon, first and foremost, was by not allowing her age or place in life to dictate her career.

  THE BRAISER

  You won’t get any gushing food description here. In its place you’ll find humor, a little heartbreak, and a lot of wit and grit to inspire your own inner Julia.

  THE OREGONIAN

  How Georgia Became O’Keeffe: Lessons on the Art of Living

  “Georgia was a proto slacker,” writes Karbo. “There were days and weeks when she would read, spend hours tramping around outside, write letters, sew, and play dominoes. … But when Georgia worked, she worked her ass off.”

  O MAGAZINE

  Simply a revelation.

  ELISSA SCHAPPELL, Vanity Fair

  Karen Karbo’s fresh and revealing take on the epic life of Georgia O’Keeffe is both effortlessly entertaining and profoundly inspirational.

  SHEILA WELLER, author of Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon

  [I]ntimate, joyful, and absolutely fun biography …

  JULIE METZ, author of the New York Times bestseller Perfection

  I want to give this book to every young woman I know who’s setting out on her own in the world – not to mention the rest of us …

  MEGHAN DAUM, author of Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House

  How perfect that a writer as thoughtful, original, and hilarious as Karen Karbo takes on as a subject as talented, passionate, and fearless Georgia O’Keeffe. The result is a fresh, funny, highly personalized take on “the nation’s greatest woman artist,” a meticulously researched, page-turning romp through the life of a painter whose days were as bold and unique as her art.

  CATHI HANAUER, author of Sweet Ruin and editor of The Bitch in the House

  This intimate, quirky, and sassy essay makes its iconic subject into an accessible, relevant figure with whom readers can identify.

  PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

  [T]old with great wit and hilarity throughout. While O’Keeffe is already revered by millions of women and aspiring artists everywhere, Karbo’s original, wry analysis is bound to enrich her status even further.

  SHELF AWARENESS

  The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons From the World’s Most Elegant Woman

  Reading Karbo is like listening to a dear friend talk about the legendary designer over brunch. This is a fun, insightful look at the genius behind the little black dress.

  THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

  Anyone with a good sense of humor should hugely enjoy, or should I say enjoie, Karen Karbo’s funny and stylish take on Coco Chanel. Like a little black dress, this handy life guide will take you from day into evening. K.K. on C.C.: oui, oui!

  HENRY ALFORD, author of How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They are Still on This Earth)

  Karbo delivers a mini-biography, with perceptive and amusing commentary … The fashion is merely fascinating, a means to an end. The life lessons? For a woman trying to find a safe haven in America, this book delivers more wisdom – and wit – per page than Dr. Phil will dispense in a lifetime.

  HEADBUTLER

  Wise, witty, and refreshingly colloquial, The Gospel According to Coco Chanel is an enchanting tour through the complex, often controversial life of fashion icon Chanel. Filled with relevant life lessons for the modern woman, this book is Karbo at her irrepressible best.

  HILARY BLACK, author of The Secret Currency of Love: The Unabashed Truth About Women, Money, and Relationships

  How to Hepburn: Lessons On Living From Kate The Great

  Karbo presents all this heterodox advice with great humor, but there’s a po
int she’s making to sister Gen-Xers: Hepburn broke all the rules women were supposed to follow and still had a fabulous life.

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  These days, women in Hollywood and everywhere else are following [Hepburn’s] fiercely independent lead – and Redbook contributing editor Karen Karbo is no exception. Her sassy new book, How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great explains what we can learn from the iconic leading lady, who makes most of today’s heavy-hitting celebrities look pretty lightweight.

  REDBOOK

  Karen Karbo’s How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great strides magnificently before our eyes, much as Hepburn did onscreen. Perhaps because Karbo’s mother turned to Hepburn and not Jackie Kennedy as her 1960s household saint, Karbo goes for honesty over hagiography –and still finds much for us to emulate. And Karbo has the same appetite for a good sentence that Hepburn had for life.

  MORE

  … Captures Hollywood mores and largely succeeds as an homage to “Miss Hepburn.”

  THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  In an interesting blend of self-help book and star biography, novelist Karen Karbo seeks to extract lessons from the life of Katherine Hepburn. How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great is a fun and spunky take on the life of the star.

  CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

  An exuberant celebration of a great original.

  THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

  Karen Karbo manages to come up with some offbeat gems in her witty new book, How to Hepburn.

  USA TODAY

  …A delightful, insightful little guide.

  SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

  …smart, witty and profound in a low-key way – everything you’d expect in a book by Karbo.

  THE OREGONIAN

  The Stuff of Life

  •A New York Times Notable Book

  •People Magazine Critics’ Choice

  •Books for a Better Life Award finalist

  •Winner of the Oregon Book Award for Creative Non-fiction

  With generous honesty, Karbo describes nuanced moments of nearly excruciating tenderness, embarrassment, frustration, and love, balanced with passages of often side-splitting humor. A compulsively readable memoir about family and the writing life.

  BOOKLIST

  Karen Karbo is nothing if not funny, so you’ll forgive her – no, you’ll thank her – for not turning her chain-smoking father’s death from lung cancer into a Lifetime movie weepfest. Instead, this bittersweet book honestly shows death to be what it is: a part of life, with all its annoyances, inequities, miseries and joys.

  PEOPLE

  Karbo’s willingness to portray the tough business of grief and mortality in all its unmanageableness and confusion makes The Stuff of Life a book you want to keep reading, and laughing with, to the end.

  THE SEATTLE TIMES

  …The book works beautifully on many levels. A lively, insightful and astonishingly unsentimental read, it’s intensely funny in places.

  THE WASHINGTON POST

  The Diamond Lane

  •A New York Times Notable Book

  A flawless, page-turning story … this is a tale to treasure.

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  A wonderfully comic novel about savvy Hollywood outsiders trying to get in … not only is the plot ingenious, but the writing remains deft all the way through.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

  It is a testament to Karbo’s skill at high comedy that the ending of this book – a funeral rather than a wedding – leaves you smiling.

  THE NEW YORKER

  This astringent, humorous novel tackles two subjects ripe for satire: the Hollywood movie industry and marriage – both notoriously fickle institutions requiring blind hope to sustain life.

  THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

  This kind of novel is a devil to pull off … and Ms. Karbo has done her job brilliantly.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  Trespassers Welcome Here

  •A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

  •A Village Voice Top Ten Book of the Year

  The Russians have come – and they’re fascinating. Karbo’s first novel, about Soviet émigrés in L.A., has passionate characters colliding in love, jealousy, politics, and the ongoing cold war between the sexes. An extraordinary debut that combines compassion with raucous comedy.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

  Copyright © 2016 Karen Karbo

  Karbo, Karen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Motherhood made a man out of me / by Karen Karbo.

  pages cm

  ISBN 9780997068320 (eBook)

  1.Motherhood – Fiction. 2.Pregnancy – Fiction. 3.Female friendship – Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3561.A584 M68 2016

  813'.54–DC23

  2013044757

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts

  2201 Northeast 23rd Avenue

  3rd Floor

  Portland, Oregon 97212

  hawthornebooks.com

  Form:

  Adam McIsaac/Sibley House

  Set in Paperback

  Originally published in 2000 by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  First Hawthorne Edition, 2016

  For Fiona

  ALSO BY KAREN KARBO

  Non-fiction

  Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life

  How Georgia Became O’Keeffe: Lessons on the Art of Living

  The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman

  How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great

  The Stuff of Life: A Daughter’s Memoir

  Generation Ex: Tales from the Second Wives Club

  My Foot is Too Big for the Glass Slipper (with Gabrielle Reece)

  Big Girl in the Middle (with Gabrielle Reece)

  Fiction

  The Diamond Lane

  Trespassers Welcome Here

  For Young Adults

  Minerva Clark Gets a Clue

  Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs

  Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost

  Contents

  Introduction: Whitney Otto

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Whitney Otto

  KAREN AND I MET AT A PARTY. MY HUSBAND, INFANT SON, and I had recently (and impulsively) moved from San Francisco to Portland, where we knew no one, ending up at this party because the hostess was a friend of a New York friend of mine. Karen, who was standing on the other side of a kind of breakfast bar, introduced herself, and not only did I take an instant liking to her but she felt like someone I had already known a very long time in a very good way. She was funny, a writer, and close to my age with a baby only three weeks older than my five-month-old. We quickly bonded over being writers and mothers.

  We exchanged numbers and in short order were spending many post-nap (the kids, not us) afternoons together, often at the zoo. The creepy bat house looms large in these memories. I should mention that none of my closest friends had kids, so I was pretty much alone in this complex, rewarding/frustrating experience, not to mention being a mother who writes, which is a whole other enchilada that only other writers can fully understand. Karen, a writer/mother herself came into my
life at exactly the right moment. The fact that she was wry and unsentimental made her nearly perfect.

  Not long after Karen and I met she started her novel Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me. She wrote it because she said that her biggest surprise about becoming a mother was that no one ever told you what it was really like: the emotional changes, the physical changes, the changes to your marriage, the changes to your psyche. “No one tells you that now you’ll be capable of homicide.” Or, “If I have one piece of advice for a woman looking to get pregnant, it’s train for a decathlon.” Or that those Oxfords “that look stunning on twenty-year-old waifs with thin ankles and no responsibilities … made me look like a Russian street sweeper.”

  Not only were there almost no books on the reality of pregnancy and early motherhood, it seemed no one was interested in publishing any, including Karen’s publisher. G. P. Putnam’s Sons had enthusiastically published Karen’s previous novels, Trespassers Welcome Here (one of my favorite books) and The Diamond Lane (a sharp and entertaining send-up of Los Angeles), but explained to her that there was no market for a novel that dealt with the truth of motherhood. One editor said, “Mothers don’t want to read about being mothers. They want to escape from their lives. When they get a chance to read, they want to read about adventure in the Caribbean.”

  However, the Motherhood Zeitgeist was looming, and Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me was one of the first books to define it. Though Amazon and Goodreads now have lists and shelves dedicated to Mommy-themed novels, Karen’s book doesn’t strictly belong in their ranks. Motherhood both defines and transcends the genre. It isn’t just a good “mommy” novel; it’s a good novel. An entertaining, funny, quotable, timeless read that you’ll be sharing with your friends, whether they have kids, or are thinking of having kids, or have no intention of having kids. No Caribbean holiday novel will ever make you laugh so much.

  This novel (the original title, Nipple Confusion, was too much of a stretch for Karbo’s literary agent, who said that no male sales representative would ever try to sell a book with that title) begins with the sentence, “I am a terrible mother.” If there is a mother alive who can pass up a book that begins with the line “I am a terrible mother” I would like to meet her. I would like to be her. Karbo then launches into a razor-sharp, insightful story of friendship, pregnancy, new motherhood, and social commentary – all of it as relevant and true today as it was twenty years ago.