Manhood for Amateurs: the Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon

By far one of the greatest books I've ever read. It's brilliant, well-written, raw, honest, prevailing. It's sweet and touching and compelling. His mind is clear and consice. It's a memoir of a real man, not a novel, not an imaginary world but this world and in his life. I highly recommend reading it.

I am only 61 (out of 306) pages in but I can honestly say I've never read a more real piece of art, at least not in a long time.

Here are my favorite parts::::

"I don't know what a woman needs to do to impel a perfect stranger to inform her in a grocery store that she is a really good mom. Perhaps perform an emergency tracheotomy with a Bic on her eldest child while simultaneously nursing her infant and buying two weeks worth of healthy but appealing breaktime snacks for the entire cast of Lion King Jr. In a grocery store, no mother is good or bad; she is just a mother, shopping for her family.

Good mothering is a long-term pattern, a lifelong trend of behaviors most of which go unobserved at the time by anyone, least of all the mother herself. We do not judge mothers on snapshots but by years of images painstakingly accumulated from the orbitting satellite of memory. Once a year, maybe, and on certain fatal birthdays, and at our weddings or her funeral we might collate all the available dat, analyze it and offer our irrefutable judgement: good mother.

‎"I define being a good father in precisely the same terms that we ought to define being a good mother--doing my part to handle and stay on top of the endless parade of piddly shit. And like good mothers all around the world, I fail every day in my ambition to do the work, to make it count, to think ahead and hang in there through the tedium and really see, really feel, all the pitfalls that threaten my children."

‎"The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mother itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you conf...ess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones in their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush. Lucky me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work thrust upon so many women. Lucky me."

‎"Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the greatest original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped with the fragmentary map that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children."