Only Child On the Air

A radio interview Daph and I did for the launch of the paperback of Only Child is now available online--the producer says it'll be there for perpetuity. Here tis.

China Re-evaluates Its "Onlies" Policy

So China's vice minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission has 'fessed up that the nation's one-child policy doesn't seem to be working so well. We are SO not surprised. Interestingly, all this comes as China is trying to soften its human rights image as Beijing prepares to play host to the Olympics in August. As reported in the New York Times ("China to Reconsider One-Child Limit") this morning:

China’s fertility rate is now extremely low, and the population is rapidly aging, especially in urban areas. Experts have warned that China is steadily moving toward a demographic crisis with too many old people in need of expensive services and too few young workers paying taxes to meet those bills.

Good riddance to the policy, I say. Because here's some backstory:

In the 1980s, officials routinely forced women to abort fetuses that would have resulted in above-quota births, and both men and women were often forced to undergo sterilization operations.

Enforcement of the policy has softened markedly in recent years, with most areas relying on fines to ensure compliance. But scandals over forced abortions continue to arise periodically. The restrictions also have deepened a severe imbalance in the ratio of boys to girls in the population because many families have used selective abortions to ensure the birth of a son, the traditional preference.

'Nuf said.

Not that I'm anti-having-an-only-child, of course! I, for one, very likely will, having found love late in life as I have, and I think an only sounds great! And China, of course, is just a very roundabout way to refer to Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo the anthology, which is jumping the numbers on Amazon again now that it's out in paperback--whohoo! My coeditor Daphne and I got together yesterday to do a little happy dance. Though she fell asleep in the cafe. She's 7 months pregnant with #2.

Image cred

Only Child Reborn Today in Paperback!

Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo is unleashed into the world again today, in paperback this time. My coeditor Daphne Uviller and I are spreading word through parenting blogs. (If you write for one or are a journalist interested in a review copy, please write CrownMarketing@randomhouse.com, with ONLY CHILD in the subject line.)

On Sunday, right smack in the middle of the Oscars, at 9pm, there was a one-hour show on Only Child on WKCR, 89.9FM. It will soon be available for download from the WKCR website. It's a This-American-Life style arts show called Studio A, and the host is Michelle Legro. The show includes a long interview with us (in which a preggers-again Daphne tells why she’s having number 2 and I ‘fess up to my newfound embrace of a hoped-for only), a reading from the book, some interviews with oc experts, and some readings by other onlies.

And on April 7, 2008 Daph and I will be teaching a Mediabistro intensive on putting together anthologies, here in NYC. Come one, come all! You'll learn about the process, from soup to nuts: how to write a proposal, find contributors, manage and edit submissions, work with purchasing editors, make the best use of your in-house publicist, and learn how to self-publicize (yep, no getting around that, case in point). You'll leave with a timeline in hand detailing the process by which you could reasonably expect to complete a salable anthology. Mediabistro also has a nice lil article on anthology making, by one of my fave ladies Rachel Kramer Bussel, available on their site.

Doing this anthology with Daph changed my life, for reals. For one, it launched me into the book publishing world. Writing my essay for it helped me come to terms with my own experience of being an only child who got divorced. But more than all that, it gave me a taste of writing collaboration at its best. For that, I am forever grateful to our amazing contributors, my agent Tracy Brown, and to Daph.

The Natural History of the Only Child

As Daph and I get ready for the paperback launch (Feb 26) of Only Child, I came across this historical perspective on only childness in an article by Carl Zimmer in Wired, courtesy of CCF:

Starting about two centuries ago, families in Western Europe began to shrink, and then -- country by country, continent by continent -- the rest of the world followed suit. The trend is so big that it may rein in the world population's exponential growth, perhaps even causing it to stop growing altogether over the next century. But exactly why families are shrinking is a mystery.

Hmmm...Well, why may be a mystery, but what it's like ain't. More on that, of course, in the book :)

Advert over.

(Image cred--oddly, a site for pets! No subcontext there - total accident. I saw the image and thought the bone signified historical artifact -- not dog! Oh well.)

For You, and for Your One and Only!

In a new book, Send Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles,, by Kathleen Turner and Gloria Feldt, Kathleen says:

“Before an opening performance, when I am feeling like I really need an affirmation, I’ll send myself a big bouquet of roses. Why not? Why should I wait around and hope that someone else will send me roses? If someone does, that’s delightful and I will receive them with pleasure. But if no one does, I won’t have to be blue.”

Love the attitude. Love the two women behind this book. And on that note, do check out Gloria's beautiful new website which features the Send Yourself Roses blog, where Gloria asks us to share what we have done lately to "send yourself roses", without waiting for someone else to tend to our needs. These two leading ladies will be in conversation tonight at The 92nd street Y in NYC, 8:15 pm, and at Barnes & Noble near Lincoln square on February 18 at 7:00 PM.

The book makes an excellent Valentine's Day gift for the single and coupled alike. And hey, if you're romancing an only, what better gift for your one and only than a book called, um, Only Child?! It's a stretch, I know, but really just wanted to let folks know that on Sunday, Feb. 24 at 9pm on WKCR (89.9 FM in NYC), there will be an hour-long program ("Studio A") airing featuring only child-ness. Everything you ever wanted to know -- from a literary perspective, that is. Our host for this one, MFA student Michelle Legro, asked Daph and me some of the most thoughtful questions ever about being writers and onlies. Some fresh new writing about onlyness will be read on the show, too.

(The program will eventually available as a download, so Mom, in case you miss it....)

Happy Birthday, ONLY CHILD!

It's been one year since the anthology I edited with my one of my other writing halves, novelist Daphne Uviller, came out. And on Feb. 26, the paperback version of Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo debuts. To gear up for part 2 of our book's launch, Daph and I would like to offer ourselves up as guest bloggers on parenting-related blogs. Any takers?!

I'm posting snippets from a little Q&A we prepared below, so you can see the kinds of topics we can mouth off around on this one. Interviewers are starting to ask us what's happened in the year since we did that book--which is also of course something we're happy to muse on. Because a lot happened. Daph went into the project loving being an only, and swearing to reproduce her experience by having an only herself. Me, not so much. I had more mixed feelings about being raised solo was always adamant that I'd have at least 2 kids. Long story short, Daph is expecting baby # 2 this April, and I've come to conclusion that I'd be superhappy with "just one." The reason for our choices? Working with our anthology contributors (all onlies, of course) and taking the lessons we learned from their poignant, diverse essays to heart.

Bottom line: In addition to deepening our own sisterly bond (I'm getting married in Daphne's backyard this summer), doing this anthology kinda changed our lives.

Excerpts from our Q&A:

Q: In the book's introduction, you refer to “so many more onlies in this country”. How many is that?
There are an estimated 15 million only children in the US, and a recent cover story in Time magazine suggested that one-third of Americans starting families now will have only one child. In Manhattan alone—the “OC” capital—over 30 percent of all families are single-child families, compared to a national average of around 20 percent. It’s interesting that over the past 20 years, the percentage of women nationwide who have one child has more than doubled, from 10 percent to 23 percent. The reasons for that are many, but the biggest ones are late pregnancy and the fact that it’s more expensive than ever to raise a child to age 18. And it’s not just happening in the US. Birth rates are falling in Western Europe and Canada too. In Europe, the average family size is estimated at 1.4 kids.

Q: Twenty-one writers who are only children: Did you discover anything you all have in common?
A: We have “I’m King of the World” tattooed on the bottom of our feet. No, seriously, we learned from our contributors that we do all have a couple of things in common. We had intensely close friendships, and somewhere along the way, most of us learned to turn friends into family. Many of us were also very good, of course, at being alone. We related easily at young ages to adults (which is a subtler way of bragging that we were all prematurely poised). And as we wrote these essays, we grappled with the question of whether we’ve become who we are because we’re onlies, or whether we would have turned out the same if we’d grown up with siblings.

Q: Did contributors like or hate being an only?
The essays fell into both those camps. Writers in the first category, like John Hodgman, Lynn Harris, Amy Richards, and Janice Nimura, relished onliness wholeheartedly and thrived as the sole recipients of their parents’ time, attention, money, and love. Others, like Sarah Towers, Alissa Quart, and Ted Rose, found themselves struggling constantly against a loneliness that frequently overshadowed the benefits.

Q: Is loneliness the only downside to being an only?
A: Kathryn Harrison writes eloquently about the fickleness of memory: if you’ve got no one to hold you in check, what’s to keep you from re-inventing your past? Or, by the same token, who can help you make sense of your parents’ eccentricities, help distinguish the normal from the abnormal within your family?

Q: Don’t a lot of the advantages you mentioned – the love, the attention, the money – add up to a lot of smothering?
For some people, sometimes, yes. Deborah Siegel writes about how she struggled, even as an adult, to do grownup things for herself, like handling finances. Lynn Harris was sending her laundry home even after college. On the other hand, they had peaceful, joyful homes with a singular kind of support system that a sibling, to some degree, would have shaken up or diluted—but then again, maybe that fear in itself is a very “only child” sentiment.

Q: Well, then, aren’t the advantages offset later in life by the burdens of caring for aging parents by yourself?
A: There’s no question that being an only comes with enormous burdens. You’re the confidant, the caretaker, and the undertaker. The pressure not to fail, or even to be subpar – in your career, in your marriage, as a producer of grandchildren – is intense. But to say that those pressures offset all the benefits is to favor one half of life over the other. Think of all the people who, as children, fought with their siblings or were estranged, only to rediscover each other as adults, just in time to share the burden of aging parents. Is their adulthood more valuable to them than their childhood?

Q: You sound like you’re defending onliness.
That would be Daphne. She loved it when she thought about it at all – which was rare until Deborah brought up the idea for the book. Deborah wasn’t all that content to be an only. Both of us were onlies by default, not design, but for Deborah, somehow, the disappointment transmitted. Her mom remembers returning home after fertility surgery, to be asked by Deborah, “Mommy, aren’t I enough?”

Q: So how did you manage to do a book together?
Contrary to stereotype, we played fabulously together. Only children can be very, very good at collaboration!

Q: A lot of your readers are going to be parents looking for advice on whether they'll ruin their child by not giving her or him a sibling. Can you give them an answer?
A: The third section, “A Sib for Junior?” addresses that quandary. First of all, both John Hodgman and Amy Richards refer to “deprivation” as depriving their multiple children of the joy of being an only. But while all our writers had varied experiences, there does seem to be one truth that emerges. Kids whose parents weren't sure they wanted to have kids at all and chose to have a single child as a hedged bet - “one is close to none,” says one writer - seemed to be unhappier as onlies than kids whose parents wholeheartedly embraced the kid scene.

Q: So come on, admit it, aren’t you guys just a little bit spoiled?
A: Vanessa Grigoriadis, in a New York magazine cover article on only children a while back (she’s an only herself), says simply, “[T]here are no set limits on what a parent will give an only child, no pressure from other siblings to split things up. It’s not spoiling, it’s just...life.”

Q: Is there anything else you’d like us to know about onlyness, or only-tude?
A: Yes. Only Child is not just for onlies, or people close to them. Even though our criteria for contributors was that they be sibling-free, they ultimately invoked onlyness as a prism though which to examine the human experience. As one contributor asks, isn’t the only child simply the most exaggerated version of all of us, navigating life alone?

Sisterhood: Obsession Rhetorical and Real

Obsessed by rhetoric, I have a new body to contemplate: the review headlines that my book, Sisterhood Interrupted, have spawned in the weeks since its recent release. "Why Can't These Mothers and Daughters Be Like Sisters?" asks the New York Observer. "Can Mothers Be Sisters?" muses the header on an interview I did over on Chicago Moms last week when I was in town. I'm fascinated with the whole mother-daughter-sister thing. Truly. And for those who haven't, do check out Astrid Henry's book, Not My Mother's Sister, for more. But what interests me, really, and what I've been talking about on the road is this: Sisterhood is generationally interrupted, but feminism--"young" and "old"--runs strong.

Just not together.

I use the word "sisterhood" with nostalgia and a tinge of irony in the title (wasn't ours supposed to be an ironic and self-contradictory age?!), and in the conclusion (spoiler alert?!), I talk about its limitations as an organizing metaphor for a social movement. Still, I can't help but think a lot, these days, about sisterhood metaphorical and real. Of all the questions I've been asked, one of my faves was from an interviewer (Veronica Arreola) who had read my previous book, Only Child. Veronica asked me this:

Q: "Considering that you're an only child, what does sisterhood mean to you? I have friends who are best friends with their sisters, others who rarely talk, and then others in the middle and can understand how they frame 'sisterhood.' I'm curious to see how someone without a sister frames it."

I thought I'd share my response with folks here, because I'm curious how others, veterans and novices alike, those with sisters and those without, feel about the concept of sisterhood in regard to feminism these days. So here we go--here's me:




A: As an only child, sure I idealized the idea of a sister—always wanted one—but I also saw the reality to be far more complicated. My best friend growing up was a twin, my mother's a twin. My best friend was (and is) very close with her twin, but my mother and hers didn’t become close until mid-adulthood, and they have an older sister with whom my mom has a troubled bond. I‘ve watched these sets of sisters suffer hurt feelings and envy in addition to enviable closeness and great love. So my closest models of biological sisterhood were of this loving but tempestuous relationship.

Historically, for the women’s movement, the concept of sisterhood was powerful. But the idealized vision many had quickly erupted into something much more difficult, but, I think, far more real. Sisterhood (metaphorical or real) is not about twinship—looking into the mirror and expecting to see oneself—though sadly I think that’s sometimes what happens when you get swept up by an ideal. The word “sisterhood” today elicits an eye roll from many women under 40 (confession: myself, sometimes, included!) and particularly among a younger generation of feminists who are more conscious than their foremothers about the intensely significant difference of race in particular, but I use it in my book’s title to evoke a profound sense of lost common ground. Metaphorical sisterhood to me doesn’t necessarily mean sameness, or agreement, but rather recognizing commonalities across our differences. Solidarity. Generation is a new, salient difference, but the finger pointing going on right now (“younger women are throwbacks—they’re letting feminism down by dropping of careers, and flaunting their sexuality!” “older feminists are out of touch with our issues!”) has reached a new low. Women across generations have lost sight of what we do share in common—namely, lack of affordable childcare, reproductive justice, access (still) to many of the nation’s top jobs, equal pay (77 cents on the male dollar!)…I could go on.

And on. But I want to hear from *you*. C'mon, sisters big and little, tell me what you think. Got sisterhood? Got a new, 21st century metaphor? A free book goes to the commentor with the best new metaphor - for reals.

Only Children and the The New York Times

Ok, I'm more than a little happy that the letter to the editor Daphne and I wrote in response to the New York Times June 3 story on only children made it in! (Happy dance image here.) Not that we're bitter that the article didn't mention our book cough cough. Nope, not at all.

Mother's Day Around the Bend

Not sure how I missed this one but Katha Pollitt did a nice piece on Alternet after Sharon Lerner's "The Motherhood Experiment" ran last month in the New York Times, linking low fertility rates (more only children!) to governments waking up and smelling work/life conflict as a cause.
Writes Katha, invoking Lerner,

[F]ertility rates -- the average number of children per woman -- have fallen below replacement level in ninety countries, including such Catholic stalwarts as Ireland (1.9), Spain (1.3), Italy (1.3) and Portugal (1.4). Even the much-trumpeted increasing US population is mostly a product of immigration (the actual fertility rate is 2.0). While politicians in Japan (1.3) seem fatally drawn to chastising women as recalcitrant "baby-making machines," European governments have started asking if making life easier for working mothers might do the trick....[It wouldn't] be the first time a government has done the right thing for the wrong reason.

Population implosion leading to paid parental leave? Hey, we'll take it. Happy Mother's Day, all you (paid and unpaid) Moms!

Only Child in the Country

Just back from a reading of Only Child upstate. Daph and I spoke to a group of 40 women in Chester, New York - the sisterhood of a synagogue out there on Sunday (thank you, Paula!). They were an incredibly warm and responsive audience. I kept looking out and seeing my mother, who, actually, was thousands of miles away in Istanbul that day. After reading out loud the part from my essay that paints her in a, well, somewhat critical light, I felt this overwhelming need to tell the sisters "I love my mother! I love my mother!"

Talk about Jewish guilt.

In Response to Memoir Week on Slate...

The other week, Slate hosted “Memoir Week”, assessing the state of the modern memoir and posing the following question to a group of memoir writers:

How do you, as memoirists, choose to alert people who appear in your books that you are writing about them—or do you not alert them at all? If you do, do you discuss the book with family members and friends while the work is in progress? How do you deal with complaints from people who may remember events differently than you?

These are questions I get asked a lot as I travel around talking about our book, Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo. When Daphne and I were inviting writers to contribute to our anthology, some told us they wouldn’t be able to write anything about their parents until they were safely 6 feet under. But not me. In fact, the things I wrote about my mother in my essay for the book were things I had already told her. Or rather, wrote to her. I started writing her letters when I was still living under her roof, at age 16. They were love letters with an ultimatum: “If you want to continue to have a relationship with me, pay attention,” they’d generally begin. My mother still has these letters tucked away somewhere in her nightstand drawer.

But still, people who read my essay in Only Child generally to want to know how my mother “took” my essay. And then there’s that other question: “What did your ex-husband think?”

In answer to both: As I finished writing the piece, I decided that ongoing relationships with both Mom and ex were more important to me than any piece of writing. So I made the decision to show them both the draft and give them the opportunity to ask me to make changes before I went to print. Writer friends thought I was nuts to open up my draft to editorial input from the leading characters in my drama. Granted, I was not prepared to completely revise, nor was I willing to let certain details or particular turns of phrases go. But each (Mom and ex) asked for one or two emendations around details that were important to them to mask. I honored their requests.

My mother—like Sean Wilsey’s—agreed that I had the right to tell the truth, and she actually, bravely, agreed with my version of truth when it came to my characterization of her, and of our earlier and often painful dynamic. My ex, for whom wounds were perhaps more fresh, may have told the story a different way, but he, too, told me he saw the veracity in my account. I give these two characters in my drama extreme kudos. They each proved big enough to let me own my experience, my tale. Mom remains my biggest fan (love ya!), and yes, to many people’s surprise, my ex and I wish each other nothing but deep happiness and are still, if at a remove, in touch.

I'd be eager to hear how other contributors to our book have experienced the aftermath of writing about their families -- or how anyone who writes personally has dealt with these particular challenges.

Only Child Goes Global

On March 22, the International Center in New York (a place where 2,500 newcomers to NYC come to each year to learn and practice English and become more familiar with American culture) is hosting a reading of Only Child. After the reading, Daphne and I and contributors Alysia Abbott and Alissa Quart will lead a discussion about growing up as an only child in America. The audience will be invited to share both their personal experiences and the cultural context of growing up as an only child here or in other parts of the world. Come one, come all!

Where: 50 West 23rd Street 7th Floor, ICNY Lounge
When: 7pm
(It's free!)

Hear Us, in a click...

Check out our nationally syndicated radio broadcast, Viewpoints

Daphne and I also did a podcast with Deborah Harper for PsychJourney - will post soon!

Only Childom Issues in the News

Two interesting pieces in the news last week pertaining to onlydom:

One on China:
China: Reining in the Rich on One-Child Policy

And one that reflects on work/family policy here in the US:
The Motherhood Experiment

Very clever the way this second piece, by Sharon Lerner, links women's work/life issues, fertility rates, and national policy. Lerner notes that the U.S., with its largely hands-off approach to family policy, spends far less than other wealthy countries on child care while guaranteeing no paid parental leave--all of which leads women to feel that they must choose either work or motherhood. "As a result," she concludes, "being an employed parent may be more difficult here than in countries now experiencing even the most severe baby droughts."

Now here's the part I love: Counter to the rhetoric of family-values champions, the promotion of larger families and the promotion of women's careers may go hand in hand. Keep an eye out for Lerner's book--it sounds smart.

I Survived JetBlue...And Please Come Out to Hear Contributors Read Next Week in NYC!

Having survived the JetBlue fiasco of February 2007 (yep, I was one of those passengers stuck on the JFK tarmac ad infinitim), I am happily back in NYC. Only children may crave a crowd, but being holed up with 200 angry, hungry travelers was hardly this only's idea of company. The best part was meeting Marco's parents for the first time, when we finally landed in Tampa, even if a day later than planned. And the alligators at Silver Springs were pretty cool too. Oh - and the guy we met in line after our flight was cancelled, who flew biologists, environomentalists, and politicians into remote wildlife areas for an organization called Lighthawk and offered to charter a plane for a group of us. He was cooler than the alligators.

Two OC readings coming up next week:

Tuesday, Feb. 27 - KGB Tuesday Night Nonfiction Series
7pm
85 East 4th Street (betw 2nd and 3rd Ave)
New York City

Contribs Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn ("Becoming an Only Child") and Janice Nimura ("Mother of Two") will be joining Daph and me at this far-hipper-than-we-are LES locale. (Thank you, Kelly McMasters! We heart you very much!)

Wednesday, March 1 - Barnes and Noble, Upper West Side
7pm
2289 Broadway at 82nd St.
New York City

Contribs Kathyrn Harrison and Sara Reistad-Long will join us on this one. (Huge shout out to Jainee McCarroll here!)

Grab an only child -- or come as a party of one -- just come!

Only Child Hits New York Times!

We're in the Style Section of today's paper. As you can imagine, Daphne and I are jumping up and down with delight.

From Leisl Schillinger's "And Baby Makes Three":

PITY the only child. Rattling around in a cavernous house like the last Tic Tac in a box, he (or she) has no brothers or sisters to play hide and seek with or to diffuse the high-beam glare of parental attention. What an unenviable fate! Or maybe not.

In “Only Child,” Deborah Siegel and Daphne Uviller gather the reflections of 21 writers and other creative types (including themselves) to demonstrate the ups and downs of “growing up solo.”...

Read the rest here.

Air Only, for real

This just in: There will be a mention of Only Child in the March 15 issue of American Way, the in-flight magazine of American Airlines.

Ted Rose's essay in the anthology, "Air Only," was prescient!

Only Child and Feminism, Take 2...

On Friday, Daphne, contributor Amy Richards, and I were guests on "The Judith Warner Show" (XM radio). I'm a fan of Judith's book, Perfect Madness, and many of her feminist inklings dovetail with mine. Things I wished I had said but did not have a chance to on the air:

In the 1970s, the mother who chose to have 'only one' was sometimes stigmatized for selfishly privileging her desire to have a career over her desire to raise a brood. I wonder how the stigma Boomer women may have felt different from that experienced by today's mother-of-one. *Is* there a strong stigma today, and if so, is it perhaps differently inflected? Parent friends who ask us about our experience as onlies often seem so anxious - is this related, I wonder, to the intensive parenting Judith writes about so eloquently in her book? That is, the imperative to do-what's-best-for-your-kid at the expense of personal fulfillment, and the return of a new kind of feminine mystique.

I'd be curious to hear what others think.

PS. Check out Daphne's new website!

Only Child Blows Through Windy City

I'm in Chicago -- town of my roots -- and had two very fun readings. One was at The BookStall, in Winnetka, and the other at Congregation Solel in Highland Park. I was touched that so many people I knew came out to show support, including childhood best friends and some of their siblings, tons of family friends, my grandmother, two great aunts, and my high school English teacher Sherry Medwin. Felt like a minor local celebrity - thanks, guys!! Some pix, including a mystery shot of me and Marco at the top of the John Hancock (guess who's who), Marco and the lion, me at The BookStall.

Only Child Meets "The Wendy Williams Experience"

Yesterday Daphne and I were guests on “The Wendy Williams Experience” on WBLS radio – and what an experience! After parking us in an office with hot pink walls decorated with life-size photos of dazzling Wendy (left), the producer, Nicole, shuttled us down a hallway, opened a door, gave us headphones, and there she was, behind the mike: The queen of radio, wearing Uggs and a tiara.

Daphne and I fielded calls from listeners, lots of moms asking for advice on how to keep their onlies from being lonely/spoiled. Wendy, herself mother to an only, brought up the “selfish woman” stigma. And the conversation also veered toward the subject of women “starting later,” as my friend Rachel Lehmann-Haupt calls it in her forthcoming book on the subject. Wendy has 12 million largely African American female listeners, and I wondered how the stigma of the only child seemed to them….

A serious shout out to Wendy for plugging our book so thoroughly and so graciously. (And for being, well, Wendy! I seriously wish I could be her when I grow up.)