Exploiting My Baby: A Memoir of Pregnancy & Childbirth [Paperback]

Teresa Strasser (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 4, 2011

Teresa Strasser made her baby a spleen and some eyebrows.
He got her a book deal.

Everyone loves babies-and pregnant women-so TV and radio personality Teresa Strasser decided to use this obsession to her advantage. She came up with a way to provide for her newfound family and help other mommies- to-be with this down- and-dirty memoir about first-time pregnancy.

An award-winning writer, Teresa is achingly honest about the motherhood she begins experiencing at age thirty-eight. With a biting sense of humor and heart, she portrays the tribulations that come with each trimester, from nausea, weight gain, and bladder infections to dealing with those other kinds of pregnant women. (You know the ones. The ones who glow-and gloat about it.)

Exploiting My Baby is a must-read for anyone pregnant, trying to get pregnant, or who is just more crazy than baby-crazy. Hopping on a trail pioneered by such lions as Laura Ingalls Wilder, Erma Bombeck, and Tori Spelling, Teresa has no problem using her pregnancy, childbirth and difficult relationship with her own mother for material. It's her blunt and plain-spoken approach to exploiting her family for literary success that sets her apart.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"...A raw, often unsettling and always entertaining look at pregnancy and childbirth. Strasser flaunts her ability to worry about anything, her many documented imperfections and brings it all down to some seriously funny prose."
-Rick Kleffel, NPR

"If you read this book you will laugh until you're sick, I swear, but it's also very insightful."
-Dr. Phil

"Teresa Strasser cuts right through the mucus plug with Exploiting My Baby: Because It's Exploiting Me. With such chapter titles as 'Sitting Stretch Mark Shiva' and 'I'll Miss You, Toxins,' Strasser's funnier than your funniest friend and her neuroses are more acute than Joan Rivers' Having a Baby Can Be a Scream."
-LA Weekly

"I laughed my ass off - which is great, because now I don't have stretch marks anymore."
-New York Times-bestselling author Jenny McCarthy

"Exploiting her baby, perhaps, but most certainly rewarding her readers, Teresa Strasser trudges, nay, romps with us down the road from the anxiety of no baby to guilt of not deserving a precious child. All the while she reminds us that the echoes of our families of origin, although carried along with us like so much muck in a river-bed, need not choke our ability to flourish and find joy as parents."
-Dr. Drew Pinsky

"Hilarious first time memoir about motherhood."
-Life & Style

"Teresa's pain is your gain. The toll pregnancy and birth have taken on her marriage, career, psyche and cervix are all laid bare for your info-tainment. Her neurotic neonatal journey will make you laugh and cry. It might even make you aroused (if you're into that sort of thing)."
-Adam Carolla

"Exploiting My Baby: Because It's Exploiting Me is a hilarious, honest, often raunchy account of Strasser's pregnancy and delivery in which no subject is too sacred to broach: Porn, STDs, the fetal benefits of oral sex and a particularly disastrous clogged toilet scene all get their day. This is the stuff What to Expect When You're Expecting elegantly omits."
-The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles

"If Woody Allen was a woman with big giant ovaries and wrote a book about his pregnancy, it still wouldn't have been this funny, warm, brassy and insightful."
-Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, bestselling author of Sippy Cups are Not for Chardonnay

"Strasser's collection of essays is a comic, poignant and no-holds-barred revelation of her anxiety-strewn road to motherhood."
-Laguna Beach Independent

"If this is what it's really like to have a baby, I should have been a lot nicer to my lovely wife. Also, she should have made me laugh this much. So we're even. If you think you worry too much about being a parent, Teresa Strasser will inform you of all the things you forgot to freak out about."
-Joel Stein

"I loved this book. Teresa Strasser has blessed us all with an amazing, inspired work. I laughed, I cried, I learned lessons about marriage and love and pregnancy and motherhood that will last a lifetime. Teresa knows how to speak directly to every one of us, and offers us the inside story every pregnant woman wishes someone out there would finally share. Her very personal, hysterical and moving story is universal. I can't wait to buy this book for all my pregnant friends."
-Rabbi Naomi Levy, author of Hope Will Find You and To Begin Again

"Darn funny and a truthful glimpse into the realities of pregnancy."
-L.A. Parent Magazine

"Teresa is the mom you want to invite to your playgroup."
-Heather McDonald, New York Times bestselling author of You'll Never Blueball in this Town Again

About the Author

Teresa Strasser is an Emmy-winning television writer and Emmy- nominated television host. Radio audiences know her as Adam Carolla's co-host. As a journalist, she is a contributor to the Los Angeles Times and The Los Angeles Jewish Journal and has won several Los Angeles Press Club Awards, including Columnist of the Year. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: NAL Trade; Original edition (January 4, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451232070
• ISBN-13: 978-0451232076
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.7 x 8.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #138,081 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Teresa Strasser is an Emmy-winning television writer and Emmy-nominated television host. Radio audiences know her as Adam Carolla's co-host. As a journalist, she is a contributor to the Los Angeles Times and The Los Angeles Jewish Journal and has won several Los Angeles Press Club Awards, including Columnist of the Year.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars As good as I knew it would be! January 5, 2011

By Rebecca Malatesta Law

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Teresa is one of my favorite personalities and she comes across just as lovely and clever in this memoir as she does on the radio. Even if I hadn't just experienced pregnancy for the first time this past year I would have bought, devoured, and loved this hilarious book all the same. Considering all the completely confusing and often conflicting (and judgmental) "advice" thrown at you as soon as you even think about getting pregnant, Teresa's honest perspective is really relatable and refreshing. Highly recommended!

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A light touch and quick wit January 5, 2011

By Turin

Format:Kindle Edition

I first became familiar with Teresa Strasser on the home improvement show "While You Were Out" where she was a host for a season- sandwiched between the other two hosts who were a spunky little blond chirpette and a high energy "lets go!" guy, Teresa was a rare tv commodity, a host making sly, clever remarks that were neither mean, scatological or the single entendre type that most "funny" women on tv get by on.

She left the show and I saw her once more on a pop news show ridiculously tarted up, and then she disappeared off the airwaves for good as far as I knew. A ridiculous summary of tv if there was no place for an attractive, empathic and genuinely funny girl between the vapid like Brook Burke and a snarling Rosie.

When she left WYWO I googled her blog and read on her blog that the reason she left was that she left she'd never have a relationship if she stayed on the road. This book I guess is the culmination of that journey.

Most importantly lets state right off that Teresa can write. This is actual writing. This isnt a book that has been thrown together from disconnected snippets scrawled on an "ideas" pad over the course of a year and then dumped into a word processor. If you are familiar with Whoopie Goldberg's books, or Joy Behar or Greg Fitzsimmons you'll be pleasantly surprised to see that for once someone didnt try to pick up a quick pay day by jotting down their "takes" and "bits" on issues, nominally chapterizing them and calling it a book. The sentences actually flow. There is care taken in word choice and there are themes developed. Teresa's writing is full of surprising delights, such as a sentence on the age of her ovaries that ends by comparing them to Miss Havisham wedding cake.

The early quote "I second-guess everything, including writing about second guessing now" tells you about everything you need know about the author's voice in this book. We march through chapters on her worrying about not be able to get pregnant before event trying, about phantom illness and conditions, stretch marks, episiomoties, not loving her baby, breast feeding, clothing, cribs etc.

Frankly some of this stuff is a bit too intense to be a good read for a man. It probably never occurred to us to worry about problems we dont have and some of the subjects are TMI.

However, apparently many women will find resonances with Teresa's concerns. Strasser herself even picked through the motherhood books by Nancy O'Dell and Jenny McCarthy for wisdom and guidance so there is a readership hungry for this sifting.

I rate this a four star book- the subject matter will limit its appeal but I look forward to more books from Strasser. She has a great light comedic touch like Jerome K. Jerome and it will be interesting and pleasurable to read her future work. If tv couldnt use her, the world of books certainly can.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars THE REAL THING January 6, 2011

By sugar mama

Format:Paperback

my baby-making days are over, but the demons of pregnancy still loom. teresa's book helps validate those unspoken feelings during the HAPPIEST TIME OF A MOTHER'S LIFE and pushes open the door to the really hard job in life: being yourself. if we didn't laugh at ourselves, we'd surely cry. nicely done.