Confessions of a Bad Mother – The Teenage Years by Stephanie Calman @Calperson @picadorbooks @Tr4cyF3nt0n #confessionsofabadmother #bookreview

Picador Books 16th May 2019 (Hardback)

The original Bad Mother is back, with the inside track on how to survive your kids turning from sweet little cherubs to troublesome teenagers.

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.

And having nurtured them through every stage of development, you find yourself alone – bereaved even – as they skip off to university without a second glance.

With great honesty and refreshingly bracing wit, Stephanie Calman’s candid, touching and very funny, Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years, offers hope to despairing and exhausted parents everywhere.

Your teenager is not the enemy after all.

My Thoughts

Thank you first to Tracey Fenton for organising this blog tour and inviting me to be involved and thanks to the publisher – Picador for providing me with a copy of the book.

As a parent of a teen and pre teen this book appealed to me right now and unsurprisingly many parts resonated with me.  The book is written chronologically, starting from age 7 & 8 (the ages of the authors children and when they started displaying aspects of adolescence)!  Young isn’t it?  The book then ‘grew’ with the children with anecdotes and stories of them as they aged up to 18 & 20.  The writing was witty, engaging and honest and I found myself relating to the author with her successes and failing in parenting during these years.  The book felt very authentic and as such offered insight into the years to come and hope, as the author shares how she negotiated certain situations.

Clearly the appeal for this book is going to be for people like me who are embroiled in the teenage years and I found the book reassuring in terms of sharing the anxieties and the losses we all feel as parents.  How to be cool enough for your teen is a question for all parents and we all have our stories – my son requested that I didn’t speak to him if I saw him at Thorpe Park when he was with his friends.  The hurt is real, despite recognising and understanding this process.  Calman is brave and honest with her struggles, she refers to her relationship with her daughter as being difficult at one point and actually her honesty with her daughter, ‘I’m finding this hard’, was refreshing and encouraging.

I enjoyed this book a lot and will likely purchase it for those friends of my who are also raising teenagers, the struggles are real but already I am dreading the loss of them leaving and all of these feels are captured in this entertaining piece of non fiction.

About the Author

Stephanie Calman is the founder of the seminal and hugely successful http://www.badmothersclub.com, author of the bestselling Confessions of a Bad Mother, Confessions of a Failed Grown-Up, Dressing For Breakfast and Gentlemen Prefer My Sister.  She is the creator of the hit Channel 4 sitcom ‘Dressing For Breakfast’ based on her novel, regularly appears on TV and radio shows, and has written for most British newspapers and magazines.  She is married with two children.

 

This is a blogtour, today is the final stop but you can check out the other great blogs below to read their thoughts on this book.