Random Things Tours: Raising Raffi. A Book About Fatherhood by Keith Gessen

"To write about parenting when you are a father is like writing about literature when you can hardly read".

While there is a constantly updated list of both fiction and nonfiction books exploring motherhood, there is hardly anything said about its masculine equivalent, fatherhood. Somehow, I´ve reached the same conclusion with the author of Raising Raffi, Keith Gessen. In fact, I don´t believe too much in parenting books; it makes you feel you are living the dream when in reality most of the time you hardly know how you are any more. Of course children are beautiful and adorable and a gift, but being a human also means being physically and mentally limited. Sometimes, it is too much to deal with, from sleepless nights to hour-long tantrums (my favorites, always).

As his son was born, Gessen and his wife, writer and journalist Emily Gould, started the re-adjustement process the parents are forced to go on for the next 18 years. Gessen, ´out of desperation´ decided to write A Book about Fatherhood (For People Who Would Never Read Such a Book). 

The book is structured in several essays, written with humour and self-irony, with some good documentation sources. It can be read as a memoir, or series of installments on topics around fatherhood. It is mostly an exercise in getting used with the slight and dramatic alterations of the relationship with almost everything, from money to sleep or reading materials for children - I am delighted to discover that Daniil Kharms wrote poems for children, but disappointed in me that it took me so long to found it out.

Gessen is a minutious observers of people and environments, the situations are described and explained in details worth of a journalistic investigation. But at the end of each essay, nothing is left unexplained. It is an enriching reading experience, either you are interested in parenthood/fatherhood or not.

Rating: 4 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered as part of the book tour but the opinions are, as usual, my own