About the Book
“Intellectually rigorous and emotionally honest, this book should be required reading.”
— Lee Smith, Author of The Last Girls
In her provocative, brutally honest, and often hilarious memoir of motherhood, Faulkner explores the societal and cultural forces that American mothers face. From the time of her first pregnancy, Faulkner found herself—and her body—scrutinized by doctors, friends, strangers, and, perhaps most of all, herself. No one had seemed to care much about how she conducted herself until she got pregnant. Faulkner also found herself increasingly dismayed by the unequal distribution of household labor in her home and others’ regardless of a male partner’s good intentions. In a voice that is unsparing and funny, Faulkner points to the unnecessary and corrosive cultural assumptions about what mothers “must do,” coupled — nevertheless — with the unparalleled joy she and other mothers take in their children.Read an Excerpt:
"I began to fantasize about being in a house with a man and a child when I was twenty-three. It was an ambivalent fantasy, in terms of motherhood; I wasn't sure if I was the child's mother. I was the man's lover, that much was clear, and the child looked like him. Maybe I was the live-in mother, or maybe I was a frequent guest and sex partner who went home to her own bachelorette pad in the city. The fantasy opens with me in the foreground, working at a computer beside a large glass window. It's dusk and a purplish-blue tinges the sky. I can see the ocean just outside the window and over a cliff--wild, angry, gorgeous. To my right at an open kitchen area, an attractive blond man is de-veining shrimp for the paella he‘s preparing while listening to Miles Davis. The music is low (out of respect for me), and as the man has anticipated, it doesn't bother me. I like the sad and lovely trumpet drifting my way. At once, I feel relaxed and incredibly focused on work I love doing.Between the man and me on a clean and bare floor, a blond four-year-old plays with wooden trucks. He loads tiny logs into the truck beds, then takes them out and splays them on the floor like a fan. He's happy without ever being loud, and he doesn't get up. He simply sits and plays.Meanwhile, I keep working. There's no reason for me to stop. My work is going well, and paella takes a long time to cook. Eventually, when the sky is dark, I do stop, and we--meaning the man and I--eat at a table beside huge windows that face the sea. We drink red wine, and there are candles on the table, the kind that bob in oil inside clear glass cylinders.I never see the child when I imagine our meal. Maybe he continues to play quietly into the night, or maybe he has already put himself to bed. I never see it in my vision, but surely the man must have placed a bowl of apples, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a piece of shrimp from the paella beside the child at some point. I might even have given him a mug of milk. Pouring luscious whole milk into a cool blue mug, bending down once to place it on the floor--I could do that. I could do it and still be myself."Praise for Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect-Life
"I've perused plenty of [parenting books], looking for help in raising my own children, but I can't think of one book as entertaining or refreshingly honest as Faulkner Fox's Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life." — Naomi Rand, The Boston Globe
A brave work by a woman who's a familiar type: educated, married, a new mother, trying to understand where the life she thought she was signing up for went and what to do with the life she is leading. I felt as I read the book that I had lived exactly what the author was living but had been too tired and overwhelmed to put it into coherent thoughts."—Liz White for ELLE Magazine
"Bravo to Faulkner Fox for tackling head-on the major issues facing women today. Intellectually rigorous and emotionally honest, this book should be required reading. Faulkner Fox is a wonderful writer. I found Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life to be loving, disturbing, hilarious and deeply meaningful."— Lee Smith, Author of The Last Girls
"...Fox's motherhood memoir is beautifully written with great intelligence, humor and irreverence."— Independent Weekly
"Fox's personal primer on balancing child care and career is a laugh-out-loud take on everything from spousal spats over housework to the damaging effects of sleep deprivation. In this fiercely honest book, Fox answers the bewildering question that all mothers ask themselves: 'Am I crazy, or is it everyone else?'"—Working Mother Magazine
"Faulkner Fox is my new best friend. This book is about real life that for some reason people are so afraid to talk about. Faulkner Fox has penned not only a provocative, flawlessly written book, but an important one."— girlfriendbooks.com
When Salon.com published Faulkner Fox’s essay on motherhood, the response was so overwhelming that Salon reran the piece twice. The experience made Faulkner realize that she was not alone—that the country is full of women who are conflicted about their roles as mothers and wives. Upon publication of Dispatches, many of these women wrote to Faulkner.
