Humor, Family - Assorted Topics, Aging, General & Miscellaneous Biography, Family Memoirs - Biography

Dan Gets a Minivan: Life at the Intersection of Dude and Dad

Name: Dan Gets a Minivan: Life at the Intersection of Dude and Dad
Author: Dan Zevin
ISBN: 9781451606478

by Dan Zevin

Available on Bookshop Write a review

Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.

Overview

A coming-of-middle-age tale told with warmth and wit, Dan Gets a Minivan provides the one thing every parent really needs: comic relief. Whether you’re a dude, a dad, or someone who’s married to either, fasten your seat belt and prepare to crack up.

The least hip citizen of Brooklyn, Dan Zevin has a working wife, two small children, a mother who visits each week to “help,” and an obese Labrador mutt who prefers to be driven rather than walked. How he got to this point is a bit of a blur. There was a wedding, and then there was a puppy. A home was purchased in New England. A wife was promoted and transferred to New York. A town house. A new baby boy. A new baby girl. A stay-at-home dad was born. A prescription for Xanax was filled. Gray hairs appeared; gray hairs fell out. Six years passed in six seconds. And then came the minivan.

Dan Zevin, master of “Seinfeld-ian nothingness” (Time), is trying his best to make the transition from couplehood to familyhood. Acclimating to the adult-oriented lifestyle has never been his strong suit, and this slice-of-midlife story chronicles the whole hilarious journey—from instituting date night to joining Costco; from touring Disneyland to recovering from knee surgery; from losing ambition to gaining perspective. Where it’s all heading is anyone’s guess, but, for Dan, suburbia’s calling—and his minivan has GPS.

About the Author, Dan Zevin

Dan Zevin has been a comic correspondent for NPR, the humor columnist for Boston Magazine and the Boston Phoenix, and a contributor to national publications, including Rolling Stone, Maxim, Details, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Glamour. He is the author of Entry-Level Life, The Nearly-Wed Handbook, and The Day I Turned Uncool, which was optioned by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions and is now in development at Sony.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

People Magazine

“Zevin is one hilarious house-husband—like Seinfeld for the stay-at-home-dad set. Raise a sippy cup and cheer him on.”

From the Publisher

“Dan Zevin yanks the car seats and the sippy cups out of that minivan and sticks a blow Hemi dragster engine back there—I mean in his prose style. In his lifestyle it's, um . . . a different matter.” —P.J. O’Rourke

"It’s a book about a regular guy taking his first tentative, sometimes scary steps toward being a fully formed adult, and it is always funny and sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious.... Highly recommended to fans of Barry, Roy Blount, and Bill Geist." —Booklist

USA Today

“Dave Barry has made a career of writing about Dave Barry. P.J. O'Rourke writes about P.J. O'Rourke. And David Sedaris writes about David Sedaris and the strange Sedaris clan into which he was born. You could throw Zevin in with any of them and he would hold his own. He might even float to the top.”

Forward

"Zevin is a poster boy for egalitarian — even feminist — fatherhood. But at the same time, he presents himself as a loving goof-off: a guy who’s picked the most enjoyable option — parenting — over working a high-powered, full-time job…With nods to Woody Allen and Larry David, Zevin has forged a persona of half-dorky (yet all-devoted) Jewish dad that’s endearing.”

Boston Globe

"Zevin, in the grand tradition of humorists, has made the most of his failures...What elevates his work above mere irreverence is the quality of insight he brings to relatively familiar terrain."

People

“Zevin is one hilarious house-husband—like Seinfeld for the stay-at-home-dad set. Raise a sippy cup and cheer him on.”

Publishers Weekly

The latest in a slew of books on fatherhood, Zevin offers the latest installment of his ongoing memoirs about having to be an adult (The Day I Turned Uncool: Confessions of a Reluctant Grown-Up). In a book that lacks the humor of his previous books, Zevin seems unaware of how unbelievably smug he sounds as he recounts the travails of moving his wife and two children from a neighborhood of “impossibly cool Brooklyn families” to one of suburban bliss: “big yard, two-car garage, and a neighborhood playground.” This leads him to fill his memoir with vaguely updated observations on topics that were old when they first described life in 1950s suburbia: “Here’s what date night is... the goal is to stay awake in each other’s presence.” But he sometimes does have a way of making trivial and mundane insights into a deep spiritual experience that demands to be shared with others. In one chapter, Zevin finds himself berating an “Aloof Hipster Dad” to accept that the hip attitude doesn’t hide that “ou’re just in over your head like the rest of us.” (May)