I'll Show Myself Out
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Average rating3.8
The eagerly anticipated second essay collection from Jessi Klein, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestselling debut You’ll Grow Out of It. “Sometimes I think about how much bad news there is to tell my kid, the endlessly long, looping CVS receipt scroll of truly terrible things that have happened, and I want to get under the bed and never come out. How do we tell them about all this? Can we just play Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire and then brace for questions? The first of which should be, how is this a song that played on the radio?” In New York Times bestselling author and Emmy Award-winning writer and producer Jessi Klein’s second collection, she hilariously explodes the cultural myths and impossible expectations around motherhood and explore the humiliations, poignancies, and possibilities of midlife. In interconnected essays like “Listening to Beyoncé in the Parking Lot of Party City,” “Your Husband Will Remarry Five Minutes After You Die,” “Eulogy for My Feet,” and “An Open Love Letter to Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent,” Klein explores this stage of life in all its cruel ironies, joyous moments, and bittersweetness. Written with Klein’s signature candor and humanity, I'll Show Myself Out is an incisive, moving, and often uproarious collection.
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This is a very funny book about motherhood, but it's not like a lot of other books on motherhood. It's not all, “my baby is amazing and my life changed 1000% for the better and it's hard but so rewarding!!!” Klein's essays show a picture of motherhood that is more conflicted. Actually, it's mostly negative. While I thought the essays themselves we're honest and hilarious, I did feel a bit disheartened about my own future foray into motherhood (which is admittedly still very conceptual).
I'm sure it was a cathartic writing experience, and I could absolutely feel & understand her frustrations and all of the identity-grappling and physical-grappling and emotional-grappling that one must deal with when entering motherhood. But it kind of felt like talking to a friend who only calls you to complain - they will assure you that everything is fine with their [relationship, job, child], but for your part, you only hear the bad stuff. So it's hard to believe that their [relationship, job, child] really is fine. That's how I feel about this book. There are some lovely moments where I do feel her intense love for her son, but those are overpowered by exhaustion and what feels like regret. I just wish she left me a little more positivity... something to look forward to in becoming a mother. But I guess that's not what this is about.
Aside: I can totally see how Jessi Klein would get a ton of shit for some of the stuff she says in this book, and I'll say that's likely undeserved. People can be truly intense about their ideas of parenting. Can't we just accept that other people have different feelings, experiences, and expectations than we do, and that there is no perfect way to do anything? Cool.
While there was a lot to find relateable here, there's something uncomfortable about reading the motherhood experience of a woman who is seemingly able to hire help for every stage of her kid's existence (doulas, night nurses, a nanny who GOES ON VACATION with the family???). The most charitable read is that even wealth can't insulate from the privations of early parenting, but one also wonders if this lady would have just lost her mind completely if she'd had to live like the Rest of Us.
As a new mom, there is so much in here that I related to and so much that made me laugh out loud because it was so familiar. Though there are some universal truths here, there's a lot that's extremely privileged (employing night nurses for several months while also employing a day time nanny... I mean, seriously, in this economy??) that I had to really take with a grain of salt. While I really liked a lot of this book, I wish it had explored the hero's journey a bit deeper rather than turning away from opportunities for more serious reflection.
