By the time a significant number of fathers began publishing books about the trials of parenthood, moms could be forgiven for thinking, "You're a little late to the party, guys." The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad is not an offering that will inspire this reaction. For one reason, comedian and actor Mike Birbiglia has written a very funny book. For another, Birbiglia claims original territory--new-dad jealousy--and marks it with both jokes and, just when the reader is poised for another punchline, devastatingly blunt confessions.
Birbiglia never wanted to be a parent. Among the arguments on his seven-point list of reasons why not: "I don't know anything" ("My brain is like a Snapple cap. It can hold one piece of information at a time") and, given the world's ballooning population, "There shouldn't be children anymore" ("I think the current children can finish out their term, but maybe we cut it off there"). His no-kids position is uncontroversial when he marries Jen, a poet whose work features in The New One: she doesn't want kids either. Until one day she does.
The first half of The New One finds the couple preoccupied with conceiving and then weathering the pregnancy's difficulties ("Jen is pregnant for about seventy-five months.... And the pregnancy is brutal./ It's hard for her too"). After baby Oona comes on the scene at the book's midpoint, Birbiglia can still see the humor in his situation ("When I change a diaper it takes fifteen minutes and looks like a paper mâché sculpture of a broken chair"), but he finds himself experiencing an unexpected status nosedive: "I am demoted to the intern of the family." He also didn't foresee that the baby would be an all-consuming force who would hold Jen's attention hostage. Birbiglia writes that at his personal nadir he had this thought: "I get why dads leave."
In The New One, as in his previous book, Sleepwalk with Me: And Other Painfully True Stories, Birbiglia toggles easily between the droll and the pitch-black thanks to what seems to be his innate cheerfulness: he never manages to stay on the dark side for too long. A year into being a dad, Birbiglia seems to have made peace with his circumstances and even finds occasion to feel triumphant: "At one year old, Oona eats solid foods and at age forty I start to eat vegetables." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: Comedian/actor Mike Birbiglia writes about his jealousy of his new baby with genuine wit and occasional perplexity.