Dating Your Mom [Paperback]

Ian Frazier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2003

From the opening essay, “The Bloomsbury Group Live at the Apollo (Liner Notes from the New Best-Selling Album)” to the title piece that discusses ways in which you might begin a romance with your mother (“In today’s fast-moving, transient, rootless society, where people meet and make love and part without ever really touching, the relationship every guy already has with his own mother is too valuable to ignore...”) to a parody that features Samuel Beckett as a pilot giving an existential in-flight speech to the passengers, the twenty-five comic essays in this delightful collection are nothing short of brilliant. Ian Frazier, long considered one of our most treasured humorists, proves that comedy can be just as smart as it is entertaining.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Open Dating Your Mom to any page and begin to read; chances are you won't make it 10 seconds without laughing. ("In today's fast-moving, transient, rootless society, where people meet and make love and part without ever really touching, the relationship every guy already has with his own mother is too valuable to ignore. Here is a grown, experienced, loving woman...") A collection of Ian Frazier's New Yorker pieces from the 1970s and '80s, it's a tremendous book. Frazier is undoubtedly one of the finest living humorists--a Thurber Prize-winner--and Dating Your Mom is what cemented his reputation. His jokes are turned just so, and if the subject matter can be a little elliptical, (as in the story "Bob's Bob House") that flaw is more than excused by the guffaws that surround it. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Something less than short stories, something more than mere jokes, the pieces collected in this volume (most of them first published in the New Yorker ) poke fun at all kinds of cultural pretensions, both highbrow and lowbrow. Among the offerings: a musicological essay that extracts preposterous biographical information from an old telephone bill of Stravinsky's; a literary history of the "age of Niven" that analyzes books by movie actors; and a page from Mrs. Solzhenitsyn's daybook that records such big events as taking Al's old Siberia clothes to the Fire Department rummage sale. Frazier's humor is reminiscent of fellow New Yorker contributor Donald Barthelme's, but is generally less philosophical and more slapstick. It's intellectual, but it's also pretty dumb. Recommended for some fiction collections. Edward B. St. John, Loyola Marymount Univ. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Picador (March 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312421524
• ISBN-13: 978-0312421526
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #413,586 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ian Frazier is the author of Great Plains, The Fish's Eye, On the Rez, and Family, as well as Coyote v. Acme and Dating Your Mom, all published by FSG. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Head-spinning, March 19, 2000

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Dating Your Mom (Paperback)

In between some failed pieces and some merely funny ones, there are some works of mind-melting satire. Throw in a viscious vision of pretention at all levels of society, and you've got Frazier at work. "The Death of Bob's Bob House" was one of the strangest and funniest things I have read in quite some time. He does not always connect, but when he does, Frazier can smack that puppy out of the ballpark.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Joyously Anarchic Satire, July 13, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Dating Your Mom (Paperback)

Ian Frazier's "Dating Your Mom," despite its rather disturbing title, is an unparalleled collection of the author's early writings, most or all of which appeared in "The New Yorker." The book reels from essays reviewing the Bloomsbury Group's appearance at the Apollo Theatre to the delightful speculation on what kind of an airline pilot Samuel Beckett would have been. Although Frazier stumbles occasionally--one or two of the essays are rather banal--the overall effect is superb.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite humorist of all time, June 14, 2003

By 

An Amazonian (Massachusetts, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dating Your Mom (Hardcover)

Frazier is a brilliant stylist and the ideas behind his pieces are equally brilliant. I was thinking this morning that perhaps "Dating Your Mom" (the title piece itself) is making a point about the banality of evil in self-help books--that is, saying that self-help books encourage you to look out for number one without noticing what the cost may be, as epitomized by the earnest advice that one should date one's mom, perhaps the greatest taboo in Western culture.

Or maybe not. But the essays made me SCREAM with laughter and I used to re-read them every six months, dreaming that I might ever find something so funny again. "You've really kept your figure Mom, and don't think I haven't noticed." Perfection.