On the one hand, I agree with this general point about parents who are writers and their children, specifically how maybe it's not such a great idea that parents feel free to share non-fictionalized details of their children's lives. On the other hand, this is funny:
...and it's funny mostly insomuch as it explicitly violates the rule of non-sharing. I'm sure there's a larger point to draw from that...
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
3 comments:
See, this doesn't really bother me, because he isn't actually revealing anything much specific about his daughter. She's sick and she didn't cover her mouth when she coughed, and she's 5? This - and what follows - is basically him saying that his daughter is 5. So, while as you suggest, there's humor in pushing at boundaries, he's not crossing a line, in the way that super-serious essayists who write about how their dimwitted but socially-capable offspring aren't Ivy material are.
Yeah, point taken. There are a few other instances where he gets a little more specific (one where he says he loves his kids but sometimes wishes they had never been born, etc) that strike me as kind of a halfway point between, say, embarrassing pictures of you as a kid that your parents might show off at some later point, and writing them off as a failure: it's the sort of thing that gets its humor from its universality, but also seems to put out there thoughts that usually aren't expressed for a reason. I'm quite sure I exasperated my parents in a similar way at some point, but I'm also glad there's no film of them saying so.
Or so you assume... heh heh.
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