How to Party With an Infant

Zusatztext "Kaui Hart Hemmings is the master of heartfelt unsentimentality. Her third novel looks unflinchingly at the rewards and pitfalls of single motherdom in a culture obsessed with sanctimonious parenting. By her first Brazilian wax! you’ll be rooting for the unscrupulous heroine to emerge victorious (and bushy!) from the Mommy Wars." —Courtney Maum! author of I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You Informationen zum Autor Kaui Hart Hemmings has degrees from Colorado College and Sarah Lawrence! and she was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her first novel! a New York Times bestseller! The Descendants ! has been published in twenty-two other countries and is now an Oscar-winning film directed by Alexander Payne and starring George Clooney. She is also the author of a story collection House of Thieves! the novels How to Party with an Infant and The Possibilities ! and the YA novel Juniors . She lives in Hawaii. How to Party With an Infant COOKING A BOOK The afternoon holds the beautiful promise that it will soon be over. A rusty gold light falls through the clouds, the cold air has an even sharper edge, and white halogen headlights from cars on Fell and Oak make the little playground light up like a stage. Mele Bart eats cashews from a Dora cup and watches her daughter play on the purple slides. Ellie, a wonderful mistake, is two and a half years old. Amazing. Mele remembers bringing her home from the hospital, her little head not yet fitting in the support cushion of the car seat. Mele kept looking back in disbelief. Two days prior she had left her apartment without a baby and now she was returning with one. There were times in those first weeks, when Ellie cried and cried, her face always shaking to the right, that Mele wanted to throw her out the window. She would cry alongside her baby, wondering what was to become of her life as a single mom, the love of her life having knocked her up, then run back to the love of his life. But now, when she looks at her daughter, she wonders what was even good about life before her. What did she have? What did she do with all that time? Movies, brunch, writing short stories. Cooking for women who had dinner parties for women they didn’t seem to like very much. Still, that doesn’t make her less angry at her lying-sack-of-skin ex-boyfriend. Ellie is talking to herself on the tire swing—she is quite bossy in her make-believe. In Mele’s prior life she’d never be doing this: sitting at a playground and filling out a questionnaire for the San Francisco Mother’s Club Cookbook Competition. She would never have predicted even joining a mother’s club in the first place, but after just a few months of being with her baby all the time, she’d known she had to find some life beyond their apartment walls, for her sake and her infant’s. She smiles to herself, remembering those early days, when she was one of those friendless parents—the ones that smile too eagerly at other moms and apologize if their babies sneeze. The ones who use lame pickup lines like “I like your burp cloth” or “How do you like your Britax Roundabout?” Mele would hit up all the hot spots—Gymboree, Day One, Music Together, playgrounds, parks, and museums—hoping to meet someone. She’d see other mothers in groups, laughing on polka-dot throw mats and think: Where do I find them? And how do I act once I do? She imagined approaching a table of mothers with her lunch tray and asking if she could sit. She imagined the mothers telling her she had to chug a six-pack, spin around twenty times, then change a diaper in one minute flat. She kept at it—flirting, mixing and mingling, hoping to meet parents she clicked with or who at least didn’t bug the shit out ...

Product details

• Authors: Kaui Hart Hemmings
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.08.2016
• EAN: 9781501100796
• ISBN: 978-1-5011-0079-6
• Dimensions: 160 mm x 238 mm x 24 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature