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Introduction

Whitney Otto

KAREN AND I MET AT A PARTY. MY HUSBAND, INFANT SON, and I had recently (and impulsively) moved from San Francisco to Portland, where we knew no one, ending up at this party because the hostess was a friend of a New York friend of mine. Karen, who was standing on the other side of a kind of breakfast bar, introduced herself, and not only did I take an instant liking to her but she felt like someone I had already known a very long time in a very good way. She was funny, a writer, and close to my age with a baby only three weeks older than my five-month-old. We quickly bonded over being writers and mothers.

We exchanged numbers and in short order were spending many post-nap (the kids, not us) afternoons together, often at the zoo. The creepy bat house looms large in these memories. I should mention that none of my closest friends had kids, so I was pretty much alone in this complex, rewarding/frustrating experience, not to mention being a mother who writes, which is a whole other enchilada that only other writers can fully understand. Karen, a writer/mother herself came into my life at exactly the right moment. The fact that she was wry and unsentimental made her nearly perfect.

Not long after Karen and I met she started her novel Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me. She wrote it because she said that her biggest surprise about becoming a mother was that no one ever told you what it was really like: the emotional changes, the physical changes, the changes to your marriage, the changes to your psyche. “No one tells you that now you’ll be capable of homicide.” Or, “If I have one piece of advice for a woman looking to get pregnant, it’s train for a decathlon.” Or that those Oxfords “that look stunning on twenty-year-old waifs with thin ankles and no responsibilities … made me look like a Russian street sweeper.”

Not only were there almost no books on the reality of pregnancy and early motherhood, it seemed no one was interested in publishing any, including Karen’s publisher. G. P. Putnam’s Sons had enthusiastically published Karen’s previous novels, Trespassers Welcome Here (one of my favorite books) and The Diamond Lane (a sharp and entertaining send-up of Los Angeles), but explained to her that there was no market for a novel that dealt with the truth of motherhood. One editor said, “Mothers don’t want to read about being mothers. They want to escape from their lives. When they get a chance to read, they want to read about adventure in the Caribbean.”

However, the Motherhood Zeitgeist was looming, and Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me was one of the first books to define it. Though Amazon and Goodreads now have lists and shelves dedicated to Mommy-themed novels, Karen’s book doesn’t strictly belong in their ranks. Motherhood both defines and transcends the genre. It isn’t just a good “mommy” novel; it’s a good novel. An entertaining, funny, quotable, timeless read that you’ll be sharing with your friends, whether they have kids, or are thinking of having kids, or have no intention of having kids. No Caribbean holiday novel will ever make you laugh so much.

This novel (the original title, Nipple Confusion, was too much of a stretch for Karbo’s literary agent, who said that no male sales representative would ever try to sell a book with that title) begins with the sentence, “I am a terrible mother.” If there is a mother alive who can pass up a book that begins with the line “I am a terrible mother” I would like to meet her. I would like to be her. Karbo then launches into a razor-sharp, insightful story of friendship, pregnancy, new motherhood, and social commentary – all of it as relevant and true today as it was twenty years ago.

One of my favorite moments is when a socialite, strolling the aisles of the local upscale market, spies a baby girl saying, “Oh, my, and who have we here? Do you smile? Are you a smiler? Aren’t you a stunning brute?’”

This is what I love: the utterly ordinary interaction of a passing adult with a baby girl, then the abrupt left turn of “Aren’t you a stunning brute?” Classic Karbo.

Since the publication of Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me, Karen and I have seen each other through kids (two biological, two step), divorces (two), remarriage (one), true loves (two), deaths of fathers (two), publication of books (many for her, a few for me), and life in Portland.

“For a woman, the true advantage of marriage is not having regular sex, but having an on-site partner with whom to debrief.”

Not so surprisingly, the advantage of having Karen Karbo as a friend is exactly the same.