What's so funny about the weddings, nannies, overscheduled children, sex (or the lack thereof), the cult of the “domestic goddess” and its manias for home decorating and gourmet cooking, and the endless tension between working moms and stay-at-home moms? Caitlin Flanagan knows, and she offers it up in a fresh, witheringly funny take on women’s lives today. Part social history, part social commentary, part personal account of the author’s own relationship with her mother and her children, TO HELL WITH ALL THAT is about the things that interest Flanagan the most: women and children, households and marriages. Presented as a series of essays, it follows the natural course of women’s lives. Without offering a prescription for happiness, it defines where Flanagan wants to be: in a world where a woman is depended on, and considered irreplaceable, by people who love her.
Julia Fletcher's chipper, brisk tone gives an efficient reading of Flanagan's conflicted ruminations. Flanagan questions major and minor decisions about working, raising children, and making a home. Fletcher's articulate voice smoothes over the mélange of essay topics that Flanagan has cobbled together. Fletcher does an admirable job establishing a consistent tone to express Flanagan's often contradictory thoughts about raising children and home care. She asks, for example, whether shopping for trendy containers counts as "house-cleaning." Flanagan's prose offers some bits of humor, which Fletcher delivers appropriately, but a title that seems to promise some true irreverence about the complications of daily life ultimately remains too inward-looking to truly satisfy. R.F. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Caitlin Flanagan is a staff writer at the New Yorker and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly. She has earned four National Magazine Award nominations and has been profiled by the New York Observer and interviewed on countless radio talk shows. She lives in Los Angeles, where she spends her time writing and raising twins.
Digital Rights Information
OverDrive WMA Audiobook
Burn to CD:
Permitted
Transfer to device:
Permitted
Transfer to Apple® device:
Permitted
Public performance:
Not permitted
File-sharing:
Not permitted
Peer-to-peer usage:
Not permitted
All copies of this title, including those transferred to portable devices and other media, must be deleted/destroyed at the end of the lending period.
