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Raising Raffi: The First Five Years
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About This Book
"A wise, mild and enviably lucid book about a chaotic scene." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times "Memoirs of fatherhood are rarely so honest or so blunt." —Daniel Engber, The Atlantic "An instant classic." —M. C. Mah, Romper NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY LIT HUB & THE MILLIONS An unsparing, loving account of fatherhood and the surprising, magical, and maddening first five years of a son's life "I was not prepared to be a father—this much I knew." Keith Gessen was nearing forty and hadn't given much thought to the idea of being a father. He assumed he would have kids, but couldn't imagine what it would be like to be a parent, or what kind of parent he would be. Then, one Tuesday night in early June, the distant idea of fatherhood came careening into Raffi was born, a child as real and complex and demanding of his parents' energy as he was singularly magical. Fatherhood is another a place where the old concerns are swept away, where the ordering of time is reconstituted, where days unfold according to a child's needs. Whatever rulebooks once existed for this sort of thing seem irrelevant or outdated. Overnight, Gessen's perception of his neighborhood suddenly there are flocks of other parents and babies, playgrounds, and schools that span entire blocks. Raffi is enchanting, as well as terrifying, and like all parents, Gessen wants to do what is best for his child. But he has no idea what that is. Written over the first five years of Raffi's life, Raising Raffi examines the profound, overwhelming, often maddening experience of being a dad. Gessen traces how the practical decisions one must make each day intersect with some of the weightiest concerns of our What does it mean to choose a school in a segregated city? How do you instill in your child a sense of his heritage without passing on that history's darker sides? Is parental anger normal, possibly useful, or is it inevitably authoritarian and destructive? How do you get your kid to play sports? And what do you do, in a pandemic, when the whole world seems to fall apart? By turns hilarious and poignant, Raising Raffi is a story of what it means to invent the world anew.
Reviews
"a tour of the anxieties of semi-gentrified Brooklyn in the 2020s...It is a faithful and perceptive depiction, though I'm not sure anybody will really like what they see ..."
"At times this feels a bit disjointed, but the book is engaging and better-written than many parenting books on the market."
"In Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, Keith Gessen does just that ..."
"Needing money for one's children, throughout history, has made parents do desperate things — even write revealing parenthood memoirs ..."
"Fellow parents will find his bracing look at modern fatherhood a sight for sore, sleep-deprived eyes."
"Gessen would be the first to admit he didn't set out to write a book of parenting advice, but young parents reading the nine frank but warmhearted essays that compose Raising Raffi: The First Five Years will be happy he did, not least for the collection's reassuring message: you are not alone ..."
"A warm, candid parenting memoir."
"a book by and for dads somewhere in the middle of that spectrum: well-meaning, serious, flawed parents who know well enough the stereotype of the bumbling, arrogant paterfamilias they're trying to avoid but also resist the sanctimony and even Sisyphean impossibility of the kind of father they might aspire to be."
"Becky might put it, two things are true: 1."
"Gessen writes about his temperamental, trying son with a depth that can only come from years of loving observation ..."
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