Dating Your Mom

"Ian Frazier is a master of short humour writing. I picked this book because it was the first one of his I read. The piece “Dating Your Mom”, for example, is quite literally about romancing the woman who gave birth to you. It’s an absurd and even disturbing idea, but it’s done in such a cheerful way that it never seems naughty. Frazier points out what the plus sides of dating one’s mom would be – potentially getting pushed around in a stroller, for instance. There’s another story in there about a guy raised by wolves, adjusting to human customs, and his wolf father shows up every once in a while in the night with a dead deer to show him where all the fatty parts are. It’s filled with wildly inventive and funny comic essays. Frazier has three or four collections out now, and I’d recommend every one. He’s written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic for years and years, and he just wrote a book called Travels in Siberia . But for me, he is the master of what The New Yorker calls “the Casual”. I learned how to write Casuals from reading his. He writes something that sounds simple, even a single note idea – like dating your mom – and then he twists it so you never see what’s coming, and in retrospect the whole concept seems to make some sort of sick sense. Anything that wasn’t really embarrassing. I had stuff going back 20 years, so I was somewhat choosy. I cut out what I wasn’t proud of and whatever didn’t make sense anymore. It’s organised in chronological fashion – not in the order I wrote them but in order of the periods of our life cycle they concern. Then there’s a section in the book called “Pieces Left Out of the Collection”, where I put things that didn’t fit naturally into the timeline."