The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood, and Freedom [Hardcover]

Daniel Jones (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2004

The husband of The Bitch in the House responds with a collection of original pieces by male writers about what men desire, need, love, and loathe in their relationships today ...Cathi Hanauer's The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth about Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage spurred a national conversation in the US about the level of friction in contemporary marriages and relationships. Now her husband, Daniel Jones, has rallied the men for the "literary equivalent of The Full Monty," in which twenty-seven thoughtful, passionate, and often hilarious men lay it bare when it comes to their wives and girlfriends, their hopes and fears. Enough with pop psychiatrists telling us why men lie, cheat, and want nothing more than to laze around the house in front of the TV. Enough with women wondering aloud -- at increasing volume -- why the men in their lives behave the way they do. The time has come for men to speak for themselves. Many of the husbands and fathers in these pages contemplate aspects of their personal lives they've never before revealed in print -- they kick open the door on their marriages and sex lives, their fathering and domestic conflicts, their most

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Last year's much-ballyhooed The Bitch in the House, edited by Hanauer, collated essays by women on their frustration and rage. Now Jones (Hanauer's husband and a novelist and journalist) offers the male version, wherein guys discuss how they feel about their standing in today's shifting cultural landscape (that is, if they care at all). As Jones notes, "The fact that women are in charge of their own birth control and reproduction may be a gigantic cultural shift, but I've yet to hear a single man complain about it." Divided into sections on "Hunting and Gathering," "Can't Be Trusted With Simple Tasks," "Bicycles for Fish" and "All I Need," the essays vary from somewhat revelatory to unsurprising, but they are almost uniformly entertaining and well written. There are several pieces in the vein of Christopher Russell's droll snippet about being bossed around by his Type A wife. Despite her "officious way," deep down, Russell knows her fussiness is often necessary. Some are more visceral, like Robert Skates's display of his jaded humor about the pain of divorce ("Punching doors seems to help. Throwing phones through windows ain't bad either"), or Jarhead author Anthony Swofford's wry tale of beating up a guy at a bar who was molesting Swofford's passed-out girlfriend. While precious few entries stray from the rested maunderings of educated professionals-there's no real scoop on what guys on the assembly line think-the book still manages to open a window into a place many women are pretty convinced doesn't exist: the male psyche.
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From Booklist

In Cathi Hanauer's 2002 book The Bitch in the House, 26 women wrote about their relationships with men, especially the difficulties involved in combining marriage, children, and a satisfying career. But, as Jones explains in his introduction to this sequel, that was only half the story. Here, the editor (Hanauer's husband) gives 27 men the chance to speak out on the same subject and to respond to criticisms leveled against them and their gender in the first book. (Several of the contributors are the husbands of women whose essays appeared in the earlier volume.) Taken either as a stand-alone or as a sequel to The Bitch in the House, it's a remarkably interesting, entertaining book. The contributors, most of them writers by trade, are eloquent, thoughtful, and (in many cases) disarmingly open about their dreams, ambitions, and weaknesses. This is not one of those simplistic men-have-feelings-too books. It's a deep and varied exploration of how the blurred gender roles of men and women have impacted the lives of individual men. An eye-opening account. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; First Edition edition (April 27, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060565349
• ISBN-13: 978-0060565343
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #965,703 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars These guys rock., July 15, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood, and Freedom (Hardcover)

I'm sorry for the woman below who prefers cats (I wasn't even going to write a review until I read that!)...I'll take these guys any day! They're funny, sad, infuriating, evasive, charming, smart, smart, smart, and honest--they're even honest about being dishonest!!

This book is like a primer for life with men--although not polite goody two shoes men, and who wants them anyway. These are a range of men in all their glory and warts. I read the bitch in the house, which, by the way, infuriated people all over the planet. And this is a rocking sequel...just what I was hoping for, and just as in your face. The main thing is, you can't really put it down. Some of the stories are better than others, but they're all compelling. Love these guys or hate them...they've got stories to tell, and they tell them incredibly well.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Why Men Lie and ALways Will " Hooked me!`, June 18, 2004

By 

The Cooking and Reading Fiend "wild-cooking-w... (Greensboro, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood, and Freedom (Hardcover)

This isn't my usual type of book but when I read the blurb on the back cover about why men lie and aways will, I just had to sit down and read it. The facts are familiar so I won't review how this collection came into being. I will say that the authors are uniformly excellent writers, each with a distinctive voice that makes reading these bland, exciting, informative, funny, pitiful, infuriating essays worth my time. Vince Passaro, author of the essay which hooked me, sounds just like what he is, a writer for Esquire and GQ. HIs essay, as well as those by Hank Pine [My Marriage, My Affairs - His Story], Trey Ellis [Father of the Year], Robert Skates [The Hole in the Window: A View of Divorce], and Toure [An Invitation to Carnal Russian Roulette] all kept me turning pages until I had consumed the entire volume. And consume it I did, in one sitting, with a tall cold glass of something brown and sparkling, and no shoes anywhere nearby.
What didn't I like? Well, the writers are all clearly educated, from a certain mental socio-economic class which does slant these essays in a particular direction. The writing is so glittering, a kind of polish that even editing can't provide to the struggling writer. So the perspectives are tinged with wealth, education, culture, exposure, ability - money. Which is fine, but it leaves out the other male perspectives, like guys who ae as poor as hell. Although Toure describes himself as poor in his essay, he is only poor financially. I would have enjoyed reading essays by some different kinds of men. Or perhaps that is the lesson of this book, that men are men with the same issues regardless of income or social class. Cow patties!
Not bad, and certainly light enough reading for a summer afternoon.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pretty good and occasionally really good, April 11, 2005

By 

Catherine S. Vodrey (East Liverpool, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood, and Freedom (Hardcover)

(...)It's fascinating to see the combination of love, guilt, revenge fantasies, naked honesty, moral relativism and depth of feeling that these men have to share with the reader--some of which they occasionally admit to having avoided sharing with their wives or partners.

Some of the essays are terrific. Then there are those that are eye-rollingly just, well, too much. Toure's "An Invitation to Carnal Russian Roulette" reads like something a fourteen-year old boy would write about what he figures it's like to have relations with several different women. It may be truthful--I have no reason to doubt that it is--but the prose is awfully purple.

But back to the terrific pieces. Steve Friedman writes touchingly and with a little bit of wonder at the fact that he's 47 years old, heterosexual and unmarried. He's willing to probe all the probable causes, even at the risk of being uncomfortably honest about himself. Fred Leebron's "I am Man, Hear Me Bleat" is hilarious, but not without an underlying resentment--which makes it all the more hilarious. Daniel Jones' own "Chivalry on Ice" addresses the fact of his wife's incredible strength and independence and her simultaneous inability to deal with bugs. Rob Jackson's "My Life as a Housewife" addresses the fascinating topic of the househusband, and may be the most skillful piece in terms of combining the modern man's wish to be, well, modern--with all the helpfulness and honesty and rejection of sexist role models that implies--with his feeling that maybe, just maybe, he is missing out on the standard male experience.

It's a great read, and a wide-ranging scope of topics. I look forward to Jones and Hanauer doing some kind of dual follow-up with actual couples--married or not, heterosexual or not--addressing a new range of issues in some future volume.