Drew Magary is a correspondent for GQ and a columnist for Deadspin and Gawker. He's also the author of Men with Balls: The Pro Athlete's Handbook and the science fictional The Postmortal. He lives in Maryland with his wife and three kids. You can watch the video for Magary's humorous parenting memoir, Someone Could Get Hurt (just out from Gotham Books), here.
Are you able to point to a moment that was the genesis or inspiration for Someone Could Get Hurt?
My third kid was born with some pretty serious issues, and it was clear that I was gonna have to write about them. Not that it was my priority to do that, of course. I was standing over his incubator in the NICU being like wow, what great material! That would make me a monster. But this was a very big personal moment that seemed to justify structuring a book around.
I should note that the book is fun as well. I don't want you thinking the whole thing is sick baby. It's, like, 15% sick baby. Just the right amount.
Your previous book, Postmortal, was a science fiction thriller. How did the process of writing that compare to writing a memoir?
A novel is much harder because you have to dream up characters and you have to concoct a narrative that makes sense structurally. It's amazing how often you'll write a novel or a screenplay and be like, "Wait, he can't be in the warehouse when he was just in a Peruvian bathroom two scenes earlier!" It's really annoying. With a memoir, it's just you and the people you know. The trick is to turn that into something a reader will actually give a sh-t about.
As much as anything, this memoir seems meant as an antidote to the barrage of messages today's American parents get that they are inadequate. Does that sound about right?
Yeah, I think so. Pretty much every parenting book now is about how badly we're f---ing up or what we need to do to not f--k up. And those books fail to recognize that f---ing up is part of the whole process, that kids and parents have to figure out their relationship to each other together. At least most of us try. I want credit for actually trying.
The descriptions of your wife's ordeals in labor can be graphic. Do you think potential mothers might think twice after reading this book?
Nah, they already know what they're getting into. Although, now that I think about it, my wife was legitimately shocked when the delivery of our first child turned out to be so torturous. She was like, "I had no idea." And I was like, "Hasn't pop culture and books warned you enough over the years to know that you were gonna go through hell on Earth?" You gotta know.
What would you say are the main challenges today's parents in the U.S. face?
Off the top of my head, money. Like, you need five billion dollars just to prop up one lousy kid. Every day, I'm thinking, "Christ, I need to accrue more money or else these people will end up living among hobos."
Also, peers. Peers are the worst. I know that one day, my kids will make friends with some awful kids who introduce them to cocaine and bestiality porn and then all my hard work is ruined. I hate the idea of it already.
And then there's the culture. I don't mean just video games and porn. I mean, like, society. We eat horribly. We have entrenched educational bureaucracies that are failing. We shoot everything. It's this gauntlet that I have to somehow take my kids through and hope they emerge 20 years later unscathed. What are the odds? One percent? It's terrifying.
It was an interesting choice to devote a chapter in this memoir to alcohol addiction. How do you think it ties in with the overall theme of parenting?
To me, it's just one of many terrible mistakes I've made that inform what kind of Dad I am today. Once you have kids, every decision you make affects them in some way, and you have to keep that in mind.
This memoir, which is mostly lighthearted, is bookended by a really terrifying event. What made you decide to structure the book that way?
I swear I don't mean this to be callous, but it helps hook the reader right away. It gets you to sympathize with our family before we go off and do a bunch of stupid crap.
Are you going to let your kids read this book?
Not right now. Hell no.
Do you think you'll keep being invited to neighborhood events after this book comes out?
Oh yeah. The neighbors have read it. If they didn't like it, they're too polite to tell me. THE PERFECT CRIME. --Ilana Teitelbaum, book reviewer at the Huffington Post