How to Baby: A No-Advice-Given Guide to Motherhood, with Drawings

by Liana Finck

Overview

A wryly personal and deeply relatable graphic memoir skewering the “traditional” parenting book to chronicle the absurdities, frustrations, and soaring joys of new parenthood—from the acclaimed New Yorker cartoonist and author

How do you know if you’re ready to have a baby? How do you know if you might be pregnant? And how do you deal with peeing all the time and being hungry all the time and fielding well-meaning but kind of insulting advice and finding a doula and being dropped by your old friends and learning why it’s called mom brain and not dad brain and the tyranny of the milestones you’re not meeting and negotiating boundaries with in-laws and realizing that your heart now exists outside of your chest and in the body of this tiny little being whose entire existence depends on the quality of your care? 
 
To tackle these questions and many others, award-winning cartoonist and memoirist Liana Finck began illustrating her early years of motherhood, giving images and language to her insecurities, frustrations, and wild joy. 
 
In How to Baby, Liana takes her witty and lacerating cartoons (“Hobbies for Pregnant Women: Waiting on Hold with the Insurance Company”) and weaves them together with comic essays (“You Married a Brute. Worse. You’re a Nag: Go Ahead and Argue with Each Other”), handy lists (“Nesting. The Comprehensive List of What to Buy and Why Getting Things Used Is Dangerous and Unamerican”), and profound observations. Together, these brilliant pieces form an immersive and comprehensive narrative whole—a baby book, a resource, and an emotional balm—for our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593595961
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/30/2024
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	141,849
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Liana Finck is the author of Let There Be Light, Passing for Human, and Excuse Me, and a children’s book, You Broke It!, and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Mandel Institute Cultural Leadership Fellowship, and a Wallant Award. She has had artist residencies with the American Academy in Berlin, MacDowell, and Yaddo.

Editorial Reviews

03/18/2024

New Yorker cartoonist Finck (Passing for Human) depicts her pregnancy, childbirth, and early parenthood in the form of a facetious guidebook with no definitive answers or advice but plenty of gentle snark. Spindly, abstracted female figures illustrate wry observations on such topics as the physical changes of pregnancy (“Is your bladder in on the sexist conspiracy that relegates women to the home?”), dealing with “In-Laws and Other Invaders” (“The walls of your home will dematerialize”), and figuring out baby products (“To my knowledge, there is no way to use a boppy pillow”). Finck’s illustrations sometimes expand into striking expressionism; a pregnant woman’s body is first depicted stuffed with random objects, then as a cage containing a baby, then as an enormous baby’s head. She touches lightly but acerbically on political issues surrounding childbirth and childcare, including the infuriating bureaucracy of the American healthcare system (pretending to be a patient on hold with insurance is “good practice for parenthood”), the uneven gendered division of labor, and the isolation new mothers face. Parents will find plenty here that’s both familiar and funny, and all of it presented with a refreshing lack of judgement. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Gernert Co. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

2024-01-25
A New Yorker cartoonist offers an illustrated guide to what it means to have a baby.

Most women may not be “averse” to the idea of having a child, but first-time mother Finck, author of Passing for Human and Let There Be Light, problematizes the endeavor with a single question: “How do you ever really know?” No part of pregnancy, including conception, is easy. Aids like ovulation tests are fallible, and even after possible conception, a woman always wonders whether a pregnancy has even occurred. The joy of knowing that it has gets quickly replaced by exhaustion and often anxiety. Dealing with insurance companies and the sudden deluge of unsolicited advice are two other challenges that might best be viewed as “good practice for parenthood.” Birth itself can go “any number of ways,” and the newborn will look more like “a toy plastic dinosaur” than a baby. Afterward, the center of a working woman’s already busy world suddenly shifts to the tiny human she does not always know how to handle—or even breastfeed, because contrary to popular belief, the act “is not intuitive.” Demands will continue to assail a new mother from all sides. As the child grows, decisions—from what to buy for a rapidly growing infant to how to travel with them—multiply; so does the potential for running into the double standard that still forces women, including those who work, to be the primary caregiver. However, as Finck sees it, the trade of “brain space, money, time [and] privacy” for love, the “one thing you forgot had any value,” is still worth the effort. The author’s fans will no doubt enjoy her witty musings and the always-expressive doodle-style drawings that accompany them. So will women looking to embark on the adventure that is motherhood.

A funny and well-observed memoir.

Kirkus Reviews