I’m delighted to welcome you today to my stop on the blog tour for the brilliant Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years by Stephanie Calman. Thank you to Tracy Fenton and Picador Books for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.
About the book:
When you’re pregnant you think: ‘I’m having a baby’, not a person who will eventually catch trains by themselves, share a fridge with ten strangers, go to a festival in Croatia without succumbing to a drug overdose, and one day, bring you a gin and tonic when your mother is dying.
We imagine the teenage years as a sort of domestic meteor strike, when our dear, sweet child, hitherto so trusting and mild, is suddenly replaced by a sarcastic know-all who isn’t interested in the wisdom we have to pass on. But with great honesty and refreshingly bracing wit, Stephanie Calman shows that adolescence in fact begins much earlier, around the age of seven.
And having nurtured them through every stage of development, from walking to school by themselves to their first all-night party, you find yourself alone – bereaved even – as they skip off to university without a second glance.
Candid, touching and very, very funny, Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years offers hope to despairing and exhausted parents everywhere. Read it and discover that your teenager is not the enemy after all.
About the author:
Stephanie Calman is the founder of the ground breaking Bad Mothers Club website and the author of six previous books including the bestselling Confessions of a Bad Mother. She created the hit Channel 4 sitcomDressing For Breakfast and has appeared on many TV shows including Have I Got News For You and The Wright Stuff. She has also written for most British newspapers and magazines including the Daily Telegraph, Observer, Guardian, Cosmopolitan, GQ andHarpers & Queen, and has contributed to a wide variety of radio programmes, including Woman’s Hour and The Today Programme. She is married to the author Peter Grimsdale.
My Review:
Today I’m reviewing nonfiction book Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years by Stephanie Calman. It is an hilarious and poignant read that anyone who has children is sure to love. As a parent and grandparent myself, there was so much I could relate to in this book. It had me laughing out loud one moment and then fighting back the tears the next.
As anyone who has raised a family will tell you, and as hard as those teenage years can be, when the time comes for your baby to spread their wings and fly the nest it’s never easy. All the fights, tears and tantrums become a thing of the past and you can’t help but look back on those days with a warm sense of nostalgia. Stephanie Calman has captured this feeling so perfectly in this book.
As I read and laughed and cried along with the mostly hilarious, but sometimes moving, anecdotes of Lydia and Lawrence’s childhoods, I couldn’t help but remember not only my children’s teenage years but also my own. Oh, my poor mother! What I must have put her through during those confusing, hormone filled days. Being a teenager is hard! But being a parent is even harder.
This book is touchingly honest, filled with the love, laughter and hilarious moments that most families go through. It makes you realise that we’re all in it together, generation after generation all going through our own version of the same thing. We may think we’re alone as we sometimes struggle to do the best we can for our children, but that isn’t the case at all! And how rewarding is it when we finally make it through to the other side?
I loved this book. It’s brilliantly written, insightful and hilarious. A must read.
Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years by Stephanie Calman is available to buy now: Amazon UK
Check out what these other fab bloggers have to say about this book:
Cal Turner Reviews 