Jennifer Senior, Author of ‘All Joy and No Fun,’ to Speak in Portland, Feb. 1

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Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Melissa Sher Horwitz, GoLocalPDX Contributor

If I had to choose one day – one story – that could best describe the highs and lows of my nine years of being a parent, I would tell you about one winter morning at a bagel shop. 

I had a cold and was getting over pinkeye. I also had a headache that got worse every time I heard the word, "Mommy." I had three little children and heard the word “Mommy” a lot in those days.  

I bundled up my preschooler and two month old and took them to eat. As babies like to do when their mothers take their first bite of a meal, my infant started to cry. He was hungry. And I was hungry too. He cried. And I thought about crying.

There I was in the bagel place, half sitting and half dancing around with my wailing infant trying to decide if I should feed him or eat a few bites when my three-year-old interrupted my thoughts.

"Look, it's magical!" he shouted to me as he often did at that age because voice modulation is for suckers. 

He pulled a napkin out of its dispenser and was amazed that more napkins waited behind it. "It's magical!" 

He pulled out another napkin. And another after that. As far as he knew, the napkin line went on forever. The happiness he felt in making his discovery was contagious. Just like that the dreary morning became a joyful one, temporarily.

I was reminded of that winter morning when I read Jennifer Senior’s terrific book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. 

All Joy and No Fun was named one of the Top Ten Books of 2014 by Slate and spent six weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. 

I’ve read a lot of books about parenting. I’ve read an embarrassing amount of books about parenting. I’ve read books about parenting methods and parenting philosophies and child development and picky eating and sleep training and behavior modification and Tiger moms and free-range-kids and oh-my-God-I’ve-read-so-many-books. 

That’s why I need to point out that All Joy and No Fun is not a parenting book. It’s a book about being a parent. And it’s excellent. 

As Senior explained in her introduction, “We’re all the sum of our experiences, and raising children plays an enormous part in making us who we are. For some of us, perhaps the largest part.”

All Joy and No Fun is insightful, engrossing, beautifully researched, and elegantly written. In the New York Times Book Review, Andrew Solomon praised it. “Salted with insights and epigrams, the book is argued with bracing honesty and flashes of authentic wisdom,” wrote Solomon.

Senior, in a chapter about a 67-year-old woman who is raising her grandson, explained that Albert Einstein “is supposed to have said that there are two ways to lead a life: one in which we act as if nothing is a miracle, and the other in which we act as if everything is.”

Parenting, it would seem, is a little of both. And that is why tackling the day in and day out of it is such a difficult task. But Senior, with her in-depth interviews and broad range of sources including historians, neuroscientists, economists, sociologists, and psychologists, did it admirably.

The book received rave reviews not only in the New York Times but also in the New Yorker and Washington Post. And her TED Talk on being a parent has been watched more than one million times.

Because I loved the book so much and because Senior is – full disclosure and a bit of a brag alert – a friend of mine, I am a member of the committee helping to facilitate her talk when she comes to Portland on Sunday, February 1 to speak at the MJCC. The event begins at 10 a.m. and is free and open to all. 

Senior’s talk is co-hosted by Portland Jewish Academy, PJ Library, Mittleman Jewish Community Center, and the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland. 

We’ve created a Facebook event page for the talk and invite all to join us on Sunday, February 1 in the MJCC Ballroom. 

Melissa Sher Horwitz is a freelance writer and Director of Communications for Daddies Board Shop. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post and on public bathroom walls all over this beautiful country.

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