Michael Lewis & Tabitha Soren
An interview with the author and his wife turns into couple's counseling.
by Ada Calhoun
May 29, 2009
When Michael Lewis's new parenting memoir, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, arrived in the office, we snatched it up. The author of the glorious baseball book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2004), and the prophetic Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street (1990), is one of America's leading non-fiction writers. As followers of his work for Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine know, he's funny and smart and, we realized flipping through Home Game, totally living in the dark ages.
The book (based on his "Dad Again" Slate column) is elegantly written, frequently funny, and yet at times shockingly old-fashioned. Lewis talks about how much he resents having to do women's work, what a dope he is when it comes to kid mysteries like the swim diaper, and how men have been conned by women into doing their part in this whole child rearing thing.
We were aghast. And so we called to talk to both him and his wife, the MTV reporter-turned fine art photographer Tabitha Soren, about how couples today balance the work of raising kids and making money. Hilarious bickering ensued. At the end of the interview, Lewis said, "Thanks for exploring our psyche. We don't do therapy, but you're the next best thing."
It was our pleasure! — Ada Calhoun
I was taken aback by some of the things in the book, like, if I can read you one quote: "At some point in the last few decades the American male sat down at the dining room table with the American female, and let us be frank, got fleeced." I was shocked by that, because when I look it our generation, it seems like men are happy to play their part.
Michael: Ah, well, you must know different men than me.
I think I do.
Michael: Bear in mind that most of the men I'm surrounded by are in Berkeley, California. So, the men I know are very much in the left end of the spectrum. Relatively highly involved dads. On the one hand, it is completely true that there are a lot of men who take great satisfaction in being involved in the minutiae and messiness of actually raising children. But, it is a much smaller universe of men who take any pleasure in the newborn stage. Men, I think, tend to engage once they start to be able to play with the thing and talk to it and have some kind of communication.
But, even so, there is just a wealth of bitching and moaning about the responsibility that I hear and it never really gets voiced. In the universe I'm talking about it's men who are potentially breadwinners at the same time that they are having all these new caretaking responsibilities and they don't have a real mental model to use. This is something that's obviously been changing over the last few decades, and even a man in Berkeley who had his first child today might find himself in a different climate than I did, even ten years ago.
But I do think that there is just enormous friction about who is supposed to do what. I think, actually, that when men are made to do things they don't want to do, like take care of a child, which they assumed the mother was going to take care of — I think they can get enormous rewards from it, but nevertheless it can be messy getting to that place.
"There is enormous friction about who is supposed to do what."Tabitha: Well, this should be put into some sort of context, both in terms of the book and in terms of the temperament of the hypothetical child. There are realities. Our first child was very far away from the Buddha baby, incredibly demanding — and still is, frankly. So that changes your approach to newborn life entirely. There are people who have easier children that it would probably be more fun to take care of. That was not our situation. In addition, in the book, there are certainly a lot of quotes in there that are not politically correct and aren't going to make us a lot of friends in Berkeley. But I feel like the book is balanced out by other thoughts about how he's very quick to feel sorry for himself. If it was just him talking about how men are getting fleeced, I think it would be a really hard thing for most people to stomach. But I think that you watch his emotional state change. It goes up and down and up and down throughout.
Michael: The broader point, to get back to the quote you pulled out, is that there's sort of this deal that goes on between couples and it used to be — I mean we're going back to what you would regard as the dark ages, thirty years ago — universal and understood. And the absence of a deal, a universal deal, has wreaked chaos in relationships. I mean, it is unbelievable to me how sensitive an issue it is amongst couples — how much parenting the dad does or the mom does. It may be that you know lots of couples where everybody's doing half the work outside the house to generate income and exactly half the work raising children, but I don't know a lot of couples like that. In every relationship I know, there are these imbalances and these imbalances lead to enormous friction, most of which is never spoken. You get it out with your friends when you meet with them for a drink, but basically, people hide it.
©2009 Babble Media
About the Author
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Ada Calhoun was Babble's founding editor-in-chief. She has been a theater critic at New York magazine, an AOL News blogger and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review. She has written for Time, Salon.com and The New York Times Arts & Leisure. Her first book, Instinctive Parenting, will be published by Simon Spotlight in 2010. Visit adacalhoun.com. |
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