Sandra Tsing Loh’s recent piece in The Atlantic is another of her long, personal-essayish reviews, this time focusing on Ayelet Waldman‘s Bad Mother.
I enjoy her writing — she’s funny and vivid — though sometimes Tsing Loh tries to turn her personal experience into dubious trends (as in an essay from last summer, when she suggested that leaving her husband because she fell in love with someone else indicated something larger, culture-wise).
In this latest piece, Tsing Loh first puts herself into the bad-mother camp, and along the way she lets us know that she thinks Ayelet Waldman isn’t much of bad mother. Not too surprising. What’s surprising is how Tsing Loh describes the year that her own sister-in-law dropped to the floor and fell into a coma. Tsing Loh and her two little girls went to live with her brother, to help out with child- and house-care. How Tsing Loh mothered during that time, how she managed to get all the kids to enjoy visiting the comatose sister-in-law, is really wonderful. She outs herself as a stellar, though reluctant, mother, and reminds us that it all could be so much worse.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of blog chatter out there, like this one from a Politics Daily blogger: Bad Mothers? What Are We Talking About?