What Hope for Bad Parents? A Book Deal

When the craze for publishing memoirs heated up in the 1990s, all you needed to get a book deal was a troubled childhood in a dysfunctional family. Think The Kiss and Running with Scissors. Well, guess what? The troubled children have matured into bad parents, and they’re eager to tell all.

Literary critic Steve Almond talks about a hot new genre of memoir on WBUR’s Here and Now. Some call it “Bad Parenting” but Almond argues that it’s really “Honest Parenting.” To wit, he says that conversation with his own young daughter isn’t clever or cute, but “unbelievably boring.” Hmm… guess my memoir of raising Brendan the Navigator will never sell.

Authors discussed in the segment include Diana Joseph, Robert Wilder, Rebecca Woolf. Steve Almond’s essays appear in the books, “Blindsided by a Diaper” by Dana Bedford Hilmer and “The Book of Dads” by Ben George.


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