Email a friendHell Is Other Parents
I read No Exit in my early twenties, and I remember thinking hell might very well be other people, okay, sure, but under what far-fetched conditions would anyone ever actually be trapped forever in the company of strangers with no sleep or means of escape?
Then I became a parent.
Kogan writes situation comedy in the style of David Sedaris and Spalding Gray with a dash of Erma-Bombeck-on-a-Vespa: wry, acutely observed, and often hilarious true tales, in which the narrator is as culpable as any character. In these eleven linked pieces, Kogan and her husband are almost always broke while working full-time and raising three children in New York City, one of the most expensive and competitive cities in the world.
In one episode, exhausted from a particularly difficult childbirth, Kogan finds herself sharing a hospital room with a foul-mouthed teen mother and her partying posse. In another, Kogan manages to crawl her way to her own emergency appendectomy, which inconveniently strikes the same week her infant’s babysitter is away on vacation, her adolescents are off from school, her New York Times editor needs his edit, and the whole family catches the flu. And in the book’s capper essay, she drives twelve hours, solo, with a screaming toddler in a rent-a-car in a futile effort to catch a glimpse of her eldest child in his summer camp play. Yes, Shutterbabe is all grown up and slightly worse for the wear, but her clear-eyed vision while under fire has remained intact: You’ve never read funnier war stories.Kogan writes situation comedy in the style of David Sedaris and
Praise for Hell Is Other Parents
“For anyone who’s ever been a parent, had a parent, or wanted to choke a parent, Deborah Copaken Kogan’s book is for you. With obscenely funny and frighteningly dead-on insights, this book is so close to my heart I want to put it in a locket and wear it around my neck. I plan to buy Hell Is Other Parents by the carton and hand it out at the playground.”
—Julie Klam, author of Please Excuse My Daughter
“Deborah Copaken Kogan writes with verve, warmth, and passion about the complexities of parenting, her love for her children, and all the comedies and melodramas that the complexities and the love together make us perform.”
—Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon and Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York
“The next time you see a modern American mom walking down the street and think you know what’s going on in her life, Hell Is Other Parents will remind you that you don’t know the half of it. Like Larry David, Deborah Kogan isn’t obsessed with putting her best foot forward. Rather, she unloads what’s truly on her mind. She’s not afraid to show her anxieties, her vanities, her deepest desires. The results aren’t always pretty, but it’s a thrilling, hilarious, nerve-wracking ride—a mother's high-wire balancing act—that I wouldn’t have dared miss.”
—Stephen J. Dubner, author of Freakonomics
“Brave, funny, and charged with equal measures of regret and joy, Kogan’s parenting misadventures spring from the page. Though her battles with smothering or totally deranged moms take place in nanny-ridden Manhattan (a world she and her husband can’t afford), her stories will resonate with anyone who ever changed a diaper or comforted a weeping child.”
—Tad Friend, author of Lost in Mongolia: Travels in Hollywood and Other Foreign Lands and Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor
“This is the stuff of life. Okay, maybe not the stuff of your life, but luckily for us, though maybe not always for Deborah Copaken Kogan, it is the stuff of her life, and she has made it delightful stuff to read about.”
—Patty Marx, who is not a parent so don’t blame her; author of Him Her Him Again The End of Him
“Deborah Copaken Kogan goes where no mom has gone before in these hilarious and affecting tales of motherhood and marriage, Manhattan style.”
—Darren Star, writer and producer of Sex and the City
Praise for the author’s other works:
Praise for Between Here and April
“How could a mother kill her children? This breathtaking first novel from photojournalist Kogan attempts a heart-wrenching answer…[An] unflinching portrait of filicide, which still manages to find light in the darkness of a very disturbing subject.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“An amalgamation of autobiography, true crime and melodrama…The story is so engaging…a credit to this narrator's wonderfully appealing voice: funny, frustrated, likable, totally candid about her desires and failings…The perfect book club book.”
—Washington Post
“…A page-turning good read…a tautly written story with sympathetic characters and evocative storytelling.”
—USA Today
“Extraordinary…fascinating and detailed…this is a story that needs to be told.”
—Elle, #1 Readers Pick
“Engrossing.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“The author is masterful at showing the fluid state of mothering in all its kaleidoscopic dimensions — the highs and lows, the angry moments counterbalancing affection, and the depths to which some will go to ‘protect’ loved ones. This exceptional, riveting novel will haunt you long after you've reached the end.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“Outstanding…a haunting eyes-wide openness.”
—Daily Candy
“A captivating thriller.”
—More
“A haunting page-turner…a compelling look at what it means to be a mother and a wife.”
—Working Mother
“Kogan has crafted an important book, highly readable, enjoyable, and thought provoking.”
—Sacramento Book Review
“Deborah Copaken Kogan, a former photojournalist and mother of three, packs a lot into this provocative page-turner. Most of all, readers will be struck by the ignorance, silence and denial that surrounded women's issues, particularly postpartum depression, in the 1970s — and by how far we still have to go in learning about and de-stigmatizing them today. Kogan writes about issues many mothers have been affected by but have been too ashamed to discuss. With the novel's outstanding book club potential, however, Kogan's debut goes a long way toward bringing these issues out in the open once and for all.”
—bookreporter.com
“With unflinching honesty, reminiscent of the best literary reportage, and a truly poetic hand, Kogan has hit the nail of many women's career plus motherhood angst squarely on the head. The highest praise I can give Between Here and April is that I had to put it down several times in order to take a deep breath and savor what I had just read. Rarely has a book made me think as deeply, weep as openly, and recommend so heartily as I will Kogan's debut novel.”
—Danielle Marshall, Powell’s Books, Portland, OR
Praise for Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War
“Eloquent and well observed, not only about the memoirist, but about the world: war, death, photojournalism and, of course, the worldwide battle between the sexes.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Shutterbabe, like all good war stories, is flashy and exciting, but it also tells the story of a tender-hearted woman who traded war's excitement for that of family life.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A candid account of one woman’s attempt to claim the spoils of the American feminist revolution under trying circumstances.”
—Chicago Tribune
