More on Rescuing my Marriage

First, I’ll be speaking about Mixed Feelings and other things with Liza Donnelly at the Society of Illustrators this Thursday 2/6 at 6:30. Come early to get a book signed if you’d like. Register here (it’s free).

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This week I had an illustrated op-ed in the New York Times called “I Quit the Patriarchy and Rescued My Marriage.”

(Here’s the beginning of it. You can read the rest here).

I thought I’d use the newsletter this week to talk more about where the op-ed came from and get into the ambiguity of the phrase “quitting the patriarchy.”

The op-ed was originally supposed to be an excerpt from my book How to Baby, which came out last April, but an excerpt turned out to be logistically impossible, so the art director and editor and I started to explore new ideas that were related to the book.

I have a theory about people (a statement that never ends well). My theory is that you can divide people into two groups: the intense ones and the balanced ones. An intense person is anyone who takes things to extremes: eating, dieting, running, working, reading, a crush, a friendship, a personality trait (such as shyness or loudness), a hobby, a look, an idea. I am intense and so are my books. That’s why How to Baby, a book about the heart-wrenching love and often hilarious indignity of the first year of parenthood, pivots two thirds of the way in into a strident (if accurate) rant about the horrors of heterosexual marriage.

The segment of How to Baby the New York Times had wanted to excerpt was from this ranty part, because it was the best part of the book, the most honest and urgent. Here are a couple of pages:

The long rant was comprised of cartoons I’d made in my first year of parenthood (which was also my first year of marriage), glued together with clear-eyed, seething narrative. My cartoons were my way of processing (aaaand this is getting personal, so I’m slipping the rest behind the paywall).