This Little Mommy Stayed Home
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Published by: Bantam
Release Date: June 23, 2009
Pages: 400
ISBN13: 978-0385342667
Synopsis
The Mother of all Motherhood novels.
In this riotously funny, ruefully honest, and irresistibly warmhearted debut, Samantha Wilde writes about one new mother who discovers the wonders and terrors of motherhood—one hilarious crisis at a time. For new moms, potential moms-to-be, and anyone who just wants to (wisely) live the experience vicariously…
New mom Joy McGuire hasn’t changed her sweatpants since her baby was born. Of course she’s crazy about her newborn son; it’s her distracted, work-obsessed husband and his impossible mother she can’t stand. Joy turns to her own mom for support, but she’s too busy planning her fourth wedding to a suspicious self-help guru. Sure, Joy’s a woman on the brink, but it’s nothing a little sleep, sanity, and chocolate can’t fix.
Until her old college boyfriend shows up at their ten-year reunion. The one she was still in love with when she married her husband. It must be the lack of sleep, because Joy is starting to think she might have ended up with the wrong man. Not to mention she’s obsessed with her sexy yoga instructor, who might just be interested in her. Joy used to be single, skinny, and able to speak in complete sentences, but who is she now? As she’s trying to figure that out, her husband goes missing….
Frank, bawdy, and full of keenly self-aware observations, this novel tells the story of one new mother, three men, one marriage, and the baby love that keeps us up at night.
Add on GoodreadsPraise
“Joy is an amusing character…[Wilde] writes with an authenticity that will entertain.”
—Publishers Weekly
“‘I was cracking up from page one,’ says Jessica Brody…’I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.’”
—Woman’s World
“A witty, frank and sometimes bawdy look a the stresses an strains of new motherhood…This is familiar territory but worth revisiting for the smiles it brings.”
—Hartford Courant
“Mothers will laugh as they nod along…The quick hits of lean, raunchy comedy tantalize readers like bites of spicy chocolate…Joy charms the reader with her wit…Could serve as a ministry to mothers.”
—Nantucket Today
“Wilde gives us insight into a new mother’s world. She deftly tackles this experience with raw humor as she expresses the psyche of the new mom accurately. This is an amusing tale that will resonate with women, especially new mommies, everywhere.”
— Romantic Times
“Think of the funniest person you know, give her a baby and a month without sleep, multiply by ten, and you’ve got the incomparable Samantha Wilde rocking the hilariously appalling realities of motherhood and the modern marriage. This book belongs on the bedside table of everyone who’s ever been a mother, or had one.”
—Karen Karbo
"Here's a talent test: when a narrator's doldrums make a reader laugh out loud. Samantha Wilde's inkwell must be filled with truth serum because this brave and funny book gets the postpartum peaks and valleys so very, winningly, right."
—Elinor Lipman, author of The Pursuit of Alice Thrift
“This Little Mommy Stayed Home had me laughing out loud before I finished the first paragraph…Beyond the clever title and absolutely adorable cover lies an all too-real story about the ways in which life can take some unforseen twists and turns once two become three.”
—5 Minutes for Mom
"[This] is the funniest novel I've read in a long, long time. What a treat! Mothers everywhere deserve this book."
—Ellen Meister, author of The Smart One
"Samantha Wilde is the irreverent, knowing, laugh-out-loud, brutally honest but most treasured best friend that every new mommy craves and every reader relishes. They should issue this smart, hilarious novel along with newborn onesies and nursing pads."
—Pamela Redmond Satran, author of Babes in Captivity
“Riotously hilarious, unabashedly honest and positively impossible to put down. Samantha Wilde’s debut is a must read for all moms and non-moms alike.”
—Jessica Brody, author of The Fidelity Files
Excerpt
Chapter 1
I KEEP SLIPPING UP AND SAYING POSTMORTEM WHEN I mean postpartum. I’m two weeks postmortem now, so I guess I shouldn’t expect more of myself. It’s like my hormones are playing Pac- Man with my brain cells—eating them, one by one. But is that really the worst thing in the world? Not by a long shot. The worst thing in the world is the feeling I have every time I sit on the toilet. If I reach down I can feel my perineum dangling just above the water line. (If you don’t know what your perineum is, lucky you. There are some body parts better left to obscurity.) The doctor who stitched me up didn’t mince words: “There,” she said, completing her work. “Now it looks like a vagina again.”
What a relief, then, that it looks like a vagina and not, say, like an Australian sheepdog or a jar of moldy marmalade. I should be so grateful! I hadn’t realized I could have walked out of the hospital with an etching of one of the presidents between my legs, like at Mount Rushmore. Or maybe it was more like Alice Cooper or another scary rock star way past his prime. What’s black and blue with hair all over? Or maybe it wasn’t black and blue from my son’s overeager exit. Maybe it could have still made it into a book of feminist art, still looking like a pink orchid, just perhaps a new long- petaled variety? I’ll never know what that doctor knew. Shucks.
At any rate, I’d imagine a vagina is a good thing for a vagina to look like. I haven’t personally looked at it lately. I’m trying to medicate its existence away with the hard-core drugs the hospital gave me (Ibuprofen). I have a friend who did the Our Bodies Ourselves know- yourself- better- labialook- squat over a mirror at one week postmortem, and I don’t think she ever recovered. She said it looked crooked, misplaced, like her vaginal lips had migrated to her inner thigh. It was funnier than the Vagina Monologues, she told me, except she didn’t have the heart to appreciate it, since, after all, it was her vagina giving the monologue like a fat old man with a lisp—not really the character you’d want your vagina to play in the show, if given the chance.