Overview
This is a story about the year I exploded into flames. Which turns out to be more common than you’d think, among forty-something humans. Yea, we can hold it together in our thirties, with a raft of hair products and semi-tall nonfat half-caf beverages and much brisk walking to a lot of interesting appointments. Come the forties, though, cracks begin to appear. One staggers suddenly along life’s path; gourmet coffee splats; the wig slips askew. In other words, my friends, THE WHEELS COME OFF.Sandra Tsing Loh is the fiercest, funniest, and most incredibly honest and self-deprecating voice to emerge from the “mommy war” debates. In Mother on Fire, she fires away with her trademark hilarious satire of societal and personal irks large and small, including limo liberals who preach the virtues of public school but send their children to fashionable private ones, the proliferation of costly skin-care products that just don’t cut it, society’s obsession with aromatherapy, her Chinese father’s disdain for her life as an artist, and $10 Target pants (“Are they running pants, exercise pants, pajama pants?”) that are the ubiquitous Mother of Small Children uniform.
Prompted by her own midlife crisis, Loh throws her frantic energy not into illicit affairs, shopping binges, or exotic trips, but into the harrowing heart of contemporary, dysfunctional L.A. life when she realizes that she can’t afford private school for her daughter, and her only alternative is her neighborhood’s public school, Guavatorina, where most of the kids speak Spanish and qualify for free lunches. In a theater-of-the-absurd-style odyssey, Mother on Fire documents Loh’s “year of living dangerously” among pompous school admissions officials, lactose-intolerant, Prius-driving parents, mafia dons of public radio, vindictive bosses, and old friends with new money as she first kisses ass—and then kicks it.
Synopsis
This is a story about the year I exploded into flames. Which turns out to be more common than you'd think, among forty-something humans. Yea, we can hold it together in our thirties, with a raft of hair products and semi-tall nonfat half-caf beverages and much brisk walking to a lot of interesting appointments. Come the forties, though, cracks begin to appear. One staggers suddenly along life's path; gourmet coffee splats; the wig slips askew. In other words, my friends, THE WHEELS COME OFF.Sandra Tsing Loh is the fiercest, funniest, and most incredibly honest and self-deprecating voice to emerge from the "mommy war" debates. "In Mother on Fire," she fires away with her trademark hilarious satire of societal and personal irks large and small, including limo liberals who preach the virtues of public school but send their children to fashionable private ones, the proliferation of costly skin-care products that just don't cut it, society's obsession with aromatherapy, her Chinese father's disdain for her life as an artist, and $10 Target pants ("Are they running pants, exercise pants, pajama pants?") that are the ubiquitous Mother of Small Children uniform.
Prompted by her own midlife crisis, Loh throws her frantic energy not into illicit affairs, shopping binges, or exotic trips, but into the harrowing heart of contemporary, dysfunctional L.A. life when she realizes that she can't afford private school for her daughter, and her only alternative is her neighborhood's public school, Guavatorina, where most of the kids speak Spanish and qualify for free lunches. In a theater-of-the-absurd-style odyssey, "Mother on Fire" documents Loh's "year of living dangerously" among pompous school admissions officials, lactose-intolerant, Prius-driving parents, mafia dons of public radio, vindictive bosses, and old friends with new money as she first kisses ass--and then kicks it.
Editorials
Lydia Millet
…a droll rant about her experience navigating the maze of school options for her 4-year-old daughter. The book, based on her one-woman show of the same title, made me laugh out loud more than once. Particularly good is Loh's rendition of conversations with yuppie parents whining about the difficulty of finding kindergartens in L.A. worthy of their allegedly gifted children: "It's very HARD for gifted children!" she quotes one mother saying. Loh's greatest strengths are these snippets of dialogue and her blunt, funny characterizations of both her own foibles and those of the many other mothers she encounters…Mother on Fire offers much to entertain the many mothers among us.—The Washington Post
Pamela Paul
Loh's ability to write a book about a year in the life of a mom, source material for many a tepid memoir (or "momoir," sigh), and upgrade it into a—dare I say it?—galvanizing treatise on somber topics like public school education, class and midlife consumerism, all the while eliciting at least one snort of laughter per page, is no less than a feat of genius.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Radio commentator and performer Loh (A Year in Van Nuys) has penned a hilarious memoir with the same title as her one-woman comedy show, which ran for seven months in Los Angeles. The story begins as a droll little breeze that soon sucks the reader into a frenzied whirlwind as Loh recounts her harrowing quest to find a suitable kindergarten for Hannah, her four-year-old daughter (Loh habitually calls Isabel, her two-year-old, simply "The Squid"). Spurned by the local Lutheran school (which deems the precocious Hannah "not developmentally ready"), Loh vaults from pricey and competitive private institutions to public school settings, discovering that the chances of Hannah making it into the desirable public magnet school are minuscule, and only one in 20 is admitted to the idyllic private school, "Wonder Canyon," which costs $22,500 per year. Loh is prone to insomnia, expletives (she's fired from her radio spot for using the F word on air), panic ("panic attacks are my booster rockets") and exaggeration as she grapples with rejection, middle age, friendship, a clueless but lovable guitar-playing husband and a brilliant but eccentric Chinese father. All parents who have searched for an ideal school for their youngster (and even those who haven't) will be snared by Loh's crackling prose. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Kirkus Reviews
Outspoken writer/performer Loh tells all about being an industrious minivan-driving mom during a particularly brutal midlife crisis: "the year I exploded into flames."At 42, living in Southern California and the mother of two young daughters, the author spent many nights fretting about how "unbelievably complicated" maternity had become in the modern world. During a woman's 40-something years, she explains with wry candor, a molting process occurs whereby females cast off the wilting skins of their former selves and attempt to silence the "ceaseless drumbeat of domestic tedium." But domestic issues reasserted their importance when older daughter Hannah reached kindergarten age and Loh realized that exclusive private institutions like Wonder Canyon or The Coleman School were completely beyond her means. Enrollment in the Los Angeles Unified School District was free, of course, but horrifying theories about the social stigma of public school swirled around the author as her devoted, tolerant musician husband Mike did his best to placate her fears. She contemplated placing Hannah in a Lutheran school, fraternized with a few of the moms, and soon playdates were materializing in abundance. Then came the devastating news of Hannah's poor kindergarten testing results, which ended her chances for the Lutheran School. Loh experienced other traumas: After forgetting to tell her engineer to bleep out a casual use of the F word, she was unceremoniously fired from her public-radio program; then she gave the boot to her longtime feminist therapist. Never one to become unmoored by strife or circumstance, the author managed to land on her feet. She chronicles her panic-stricken neuroses in arelentlessly frenetic, blog-like narrative. It's all about capitalized key words, hyperactive hysteria and . . . reestablishing a firm grip on motherhood. Like a long dinner date with that melodramatic, motor-mouthed best friend you can't imagine life without. Agent: Sloan Harris/ICMThe Barnes & Noble Review
A few years back -- according to an article she wrote for the Atlantic Monthly in March 2008 -- the writer and NPR radio commentator Sandra Tsing Loh got a chance to interview Jonathan Kozol, the author of Savage Inequalities, Shame of the Nation, and other scathing assessments of American public education. Although she counts herself as "long-time, rabid fan" of Kozol, she nevertheless had some beef with the guy. "Speaking of moral leaders," she claims to have said, "since your work is so admired by such magazines as Harper's and The Nation, why don't you simply exhort those readers to SEND THEIR KIDS TO PUBLIC SCHOOL? How many of those staffers' kids are in elite privates? Talk about Shame of The Nation!" Kozol, who has no children, politely said that he didn't feel fit to judge other parents' private decisions. It was up to Loh, who does have two children in the Los Angeles public schools, to do a little exhorting of her own.And exhort she has! From her bully pulpit as a contributing editor at the Atlantic and a regular NPR commentator, Loh has emerged as this generation's worthy -- and wildly funnier -- successor to Kozol. A self-described "Pushy, Type A, whitish mother" (her father is from Shanghai; her mother, from Germany) who considers herself a member of the "middle-class poor," Loh has channeled her considerable, aggressive talents into improving her children's school: Among other things, she's banded together with Armenian and Salvadoran mothers to start an after-school basketball team, snagged a grant from VH1 to buy instruments and start a music program, and started a blog to help other parents navigate the "RING OF HELL" (this is a woman partial to ALL CAPS) known as the Los Angeles Unified School District.
But as Mother on Fire makes abundantly clear, it was not always thus. The year her eldest daughter, Hannah, turned four, Loh pursued the perfect school with the kind of ardor usually reserved for pursuit of a lover -- and initially, not a single one of them was in the L.A. public school system. In fact, while the book opens with Loh sending the Kahlo-worshipping, pierced, tattooed feminista undergrads she teaches at Marymount College into paroxysms of horror with her "portrait of the narrative in the post-feminist age" -- a chalkboard scrawl that reads, "NO MORE MR. DARCY!" -- each new school she visits, in her mind, is rated on how closely it resembles a suitor in Pride and Prejudice. Forget the trophy husband, Loh implies -- for the modern mother, it's all about the trophy kid. And who decides whether you've bred a winner? Why, the school admissions officer, of course.
Of course, trophy husbands are useful -- someone has to foot the tuition for the trophy school, and sadly, Loh doesn't have one of those. Her own husband, Mike, a bread-baking, tomato-growing, intermittently employed studio musician, is a sweet, artistic, family-oriented kind of guy described as having "the soul of Mr. Darcy with the income of Mr. Collins" (who came in dead last among the Austen-novel suitors). Loh has always been at her best when describing the crunch of being an artist with upper-middle-class tastes and middle-to-lower-middle-class income -- back in her 30s, in her collection Depth Takes a Holiday, she was writing about her family's infatuation with Ikea and Trader Joe's -- and it's here that she differentiates herself from most contemporary writers on post-feminist family life, the vast majority of whom seem unapologetically preoccupied with the child-rearing dilemmas of "professional-class" (i.e., wealthy, educated) parents (A partial laundry list would include: Sylvia Anne Hewlett, Lisa Belkin, Allison Pearson, Meg Wolitzer, Judith Warner, Adam Gopnik, and Caitlin Flanagan, Loh's predecessor at the Atlantic).
As a Cal Tech–educated radio personality and author of four books, Loh is hardly the poster woman for the working poor. Likewise, she's hardly above yearning for the baubles enjoyed by her wealthy friends, be it the four-handed massage she gets at a spa day with her screenwriter friend, or admission to Wonder Canyon, the school so exclusive that no one can even get a tour. But more often than not, her writing hinges on the moment when the bill, be it literal or metaphorical, comes due and she reminds herself -- and her readers -- how few have the dough to pay. The cast of characters reads like a (sometimes kindly) satire of 21st-century über-parents: There's Aimee, the pharmaceutical rep, who sends Loh dire updates on schools via BlackBerry and is convinced her son, Ben, is a violin virtuoso (when Loh replies, "Perhaps Ben can grow up to be a musician, a real working musician like Mike, and move out to where we live, in Van Nuys," Aimee's husband snaps back, "Well, there are plenty of surgeons who enjoy playing the violin!"). Loh's long-lost best girlfriend, Celeste, suggests she "liquidate some stock" to pay for her child's education (Loh has none, of course), and there are some tense years after Celeste's stepdaughter mistakes Loh for the Third World nanny of her own blonde children. Los Angeles, Loh discovers, is suffering from "an epidemic of frighteningly gifted children," according to their upper-middle-class parents, who wield diagnoses of ADD and Asperger's syndrome like badges of honor and insist their offspring are too fragile for the rough-and-tumble world of subpar schools. Loh sums up one overprotective mother's view: "Some children in this world survive without shoes; Ezekiel will not survive if he has to take French from a non-native speaker." Loh's chance to secure a place for her own children in the world of the "frighteningly gifted" comes, incidentally, from a well-timed -- and by now infamous -- use of the F-word. When her engineer failed to bleep an expletive she let loose when she pre-recorded her public radio show, Loh was fired -- and soon thereafter became a bona-fide free-speech celebrity. She was covered by CNN, the BBC, and Frank Rich, invited to gatherings where socialites smashed their NPR mugs in her honor. Most important, she was offered a slot at the Cartier of kindergartens (for only $25,000 per year!).
And yet, we all know how it ends. Loh's "A-hah!" moment comes when she walks into Guavatorina, the neighborhood public school she has thus far likened to sending her kid to school in Mexico. "Every time I've spat out 'Guavatorina,' it never occurred to me that any of us was talking about actual children," she writes. "I had always assumed we were talking about the Bush administration, an evil government torture institution, twin office towers full of bureaucrats, a bunch of smoky, sky-fouling oil derricks." But standing in the classroom, looking at a room full of kindergarteners she realizes: "It's like that moment when Charlton Heston yells, 'Solyent green...is people!' Oh my God, I think. The horrible truth is...Guavatorina...is children!" And those of us with kids in the public schools have found our post-feminist, post-Kozol, fire-breathing advocate. Who needs Mr. Darcy? --Amy Benfer
Amy Benfer has worked as an editor and staff writer at Salon, Legal Affairs, and Paper magazine. Her reviews and features on books have appeared in Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, The Believer, Kirkus, and The New York Times Book Review.