Act Like You Got Some Sense: And Other Things My Daughters Taught Me

"I’ve always had a fondness for Jamie Foxx, and Act Like You Got Some Sense is a fun, well-written book. He picked a very good co-writer, Nick Chiles, who helps Foxx’s voice come through. This book is something of a tie-in to the Netflix show Foxx made with his daughter (who produced it) about a father-daughter relationship. As always, celebrity memoirs are part of the brand the celebrity is selling and are designed to make money. Rather than tsk-tsk and say, “that’s so terrible,” I’d ask whether the book is worth our money and time. I think this one is. Act Like You Got Some Sense is a guide to parenting, told through stories that impart lessons Foxx learned about parenting, often by failing as a parent. I would especially recommend this book to mothers, who in my experience hold themselves to (or are held to) much higher standards than fathers. They know it’s impossible to be perfect, yet they still always feel like they’re failing. The main message of this book is that you’re inevitably going to fail, but it’s okay: the most important thing you can do as a parent is show up and be present. If you do that, your children will ultimately forgive your screw-ups. Foxx takes a jokey approach: “When you take the kid to school on Monday, you actually have to get up and take them again on Tuesday. Damn, they got to go every day?” But his joke captures the relentlessness and boredom of parenting and the unheroic nature of being a good parent; he helps us see that parents might not always give themselves credit for simply showing up, over and over again – but they should. One reason Foxx can see the value of simply being there for his daughters is that his biological mother did not raise him but left him with her parents, and his father pretty much abandoned him. He eventually reconciles with his mother, but he doesn’t reconcile with his father, and decides not to attend his funeral. He says he had to think about what that meant to his children, whom he tries to teach the importance of forgiveness. On this score, he writes, “The lesson I have for my daughters is that sometimes you just have to let go of things, of people, of emotions that are weighing you down.” What I also found interesting about the book is that he deliberately chose never to marry and to be a very involved parent. He has a daughter apiece with two women that he dated but never married. With the mothers’ cooperation, the girls were raised as sisters. I liked reading about a non-normative approach to family life and parenting. I’ve read many accounts of how people handled parenting after getting married and divorced, but few that describe someone who, not as a single parent, deliberately separated parenting from marriage and cohabitation. It’s useful to read about the nuts and bolts of being a good and thoughtful parent outside the framework of the nuclear family. I would say so. The Will Smith book has carefully timed little jokes interspersed throughout and the Miriam Margolyes book is amusingly eccentric. Foxx’s book is structured as a series of short comedy sketches that are fables about how to be a good parent. Each chapter has a particular topic, such as ‘how do you handle children’s exposure to social media?’ The chapter then provides an extended anecdote, usually told in stand-up comic mode, that offers both a precept and a piece of practical advice. Something else I appreciated about Foxx is that he explicitly says, “I am a feminist.” He makes this point not as an activist, but as a father of daughters. He notes that women are usually evaluated in terms of their physical appearance and talks about encouraging his daughters to be rewarded for things other than looking good. He says that as a realist, he aims to give his daughters tools for dealing with the challenges they will face as women, because even though women are equal to men, they’re not treated equally: “Women deal with a lot more shit than men.” It’s probably sad that I find it so refreshing to hear him say that, but it’s something I rarely hear men acknowledge unprompted. Foxx considers it part of his job as a father of daughters to help them navigate the world Tarana Burke described, one that routinely inflicts horrific damage on women. Foxx’s book also has plenty to offer those interested in learning more about him as a person and understanding his path to celebrity. He writes a lot about his childhood, about his career, and about balancing work and family. Like Margolyes, he frames some of what he learned as lessons ordinary people could adapt to their situations. For example, he describes taking a required dance class in college. He’s terrible at executing steps, and doesn’t see how he is going to pass the class, which he needs for his major. But he can play the piano, so he offers to accompany the other students for course credit. He turns that experience into advice: ‘Whatever you want to do in life, figure out what your version of playing the piano is, and use what you’re already good at to succeed in something that you might find more challenging.’ A useful life hack, even for those of us who are never going to be Academy Award winners."