Amateur Hour

March 5, 2018
This funny, angry, and moving essay collection from Harrington, a copywriter and regular contributor to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, considers life for women dealing with motherhood, work, marriage, self-image, expectations, ambition, fatigue, and everything else. “Our culture has set the bar so high that it’s hidden in a place where we’ll never find it,” she writes. Per the subtitle, the writing is often profane, but just as often poignant, as in Harrington’s opening salvo, addressed to her children and titled, “I Don’t Want to Be Dying to Tell You These Things,” which states “you will be disappointed to learn that parents, and adults in general, do not have all the answers.” Full of “righteous anger” about how quickly new mothers are expected to leap back into full-time work, nostalgia for the “nowhere-but-here” days spent with toddlers, and grief for lost loved ones, Harrington is at her best in the most personal pieces, including discussions of working from home (“The Super Bowl of Interruptions”) and of trying to parent without overpraising children (“Your Participation Trophies Are Bullshit”). The collection also has short throwaways (“Your Cute Wedding Hashtags 20 Years Later”) and clever humor pieces, such as an essay presenting motherhood as a job description. All of the topics covered are familiar, but Harrington’s approach to them is singular, and readers—particularly those who have been in the motherhood trenches—will smile, laugh, and maybe even shed a tear.

March 15, 2018
The modern motherhood memoir in a series of sardonic spoofs.Creative director and humor writer Harrington reversed the typical American experience of childbearing, working 60-hour weeks while taking care of her newborn children before staying home with them a few years later, when a layoff forced her into freelance work. Using plenty of swear words, as advertised, she chronicles her years on both sides of the mommy wars, tallying the insults of an unenlightened corporate culture and the exquisite tortures of working from home with kids. The narrative features blog-style recollections punctuated with "time-outs": conceptual interludes featuring hashtags, listicles, pretend dialogues, and quizzes ("Radiohead Song or Accurate Description of My Parenting?"). The least successful of these experiments are still clever, and though her comedic timing often fizzles, the frenzy of styles and self-conscious gimmicks keeps things lively and justifies her career as a professional thrower of ideas at walls. Harrington embraces the bravado and casual irreverence of the advertising industry even as she mocks it, and she never tires of portraying herself as an ill-fitting matriarch, a Don Draper who awoke one day to find himself leading a Girl Scout troop. The author is at her wittiest when transforming her outrage--especially at the sorry plight of mothers in the United States and their "cultural irrelevance" after maternity leave--into absurd, acerbic commentary. Like all effective satire, Harrington's best bits arise from deep anger, and she reminds readers that, more than meal trains or forced holidays, mothers desperately need policy reform. Too often, her essays switch unexpectedly into truisms and parenting advice for soul-weary breeders, saccharine (if sincere) messages of encouragement that do not pair well with a plateful of sarcasm. Even if many of her observations and experiences prove more common and less funny than the packaging suggests, her quirky, dissenting energy should resonate with parents who find little use for the usual mommy-blogger fare.Bitterly hilarious in spots.

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April 15, 2018
Selling this book as a book about motherhood would sell it short. It is not about any one thing. Rather, it is a meditation on a full, beautiful, and messy life. In her first book, Harrington, a contributor to the New Yorker and McSweeney's, writes about being a woman in her twenties, thirties, and forties; about being a working woman, wife, and mother; about being a person who struggles daily with anxiety and worry for her future, her death, her children's safety, and her marriage. No piece in this collection of short vignettes is much like another. Some are heartfelt and honest (describing what it's like to wash the body of a family member who has died or to have regrets about raising children in the social-media age), while others take on a satirical, fantasy-like quality (imagining a pilot berating, over the in-flight intercom, a mother for her personal failings). Chapters will make readers rotate through laughter, tears, and cringing, and are all written with refreshingly honest and bold abandon.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)