Love, Mom: Poignant, Goofy, Brilliant Messages from Home [Hardcover]

Doree Shafrir (Author), Jessica Grose (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 24, 2009

MY MOTHER SENDS ME EMAILS IN ALL CAPS SO IT ALWAYS SEEMS LIKE SHE IS YELLING. SO IN HER STYLE I WILL SAY, I LOVE THIS BOOK!!!!!
-Margaret Cho

Love, Mom is a hilarious look at what happens when interfering, maddening, kvetching, querying, and loving moms push the `send' button. This is a great book for anyone who ever looked at her email inbox and said, `Oh, no--it's from my mom.'
-Amy Dickinson, author of The Mighty Queens of Freeville, "Ask Amy" syndicated advice columnist, and NPR contributor

This book is hilarious and smart--a wittily organized collection that proves, without a doubt, that our moms are humankind's most natural comedians.
-Mike Albo, author of Hornito and The Underminer

I'm much older than my computer--are you suggesting that the older something is, the more uselss it becomes? Because that's what I'm hearing (although I'm not hearing it very well.....)
Love,
your old mom

Yes, I am a pest, but I just looked at Iowa weather and it will be 5 below Tuesday night. Hope you have a hat with ears. Love you, Mom

Sweet, funny, endearing, slightly technologically inept, and always just a little nagging, emails from mothers to their adult children are much more fun to read when it's somebody else's mother. PostcardsFromYoMomma.com is proof of that--when it launched, this repository of reader-submitted missives from Mom received more than 100,000 unique visitors in just the first two weeks. In Love, Mom, editors Doree Shafrir and Jessica Grose have assembled more than two hundred of the best never-before-seen submissions.

From school, sex, technology, and appearance to health, work, holidays, and food--and complete with a selection of celebrity emails (including Oscar-winner Diablo Cody's mom on her daughter's "blob"), and sidebars throughout--Love, Mom is ultimately a reflection on how our moms are always our moms . . . no matter how the message is sent.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Doree Shafrir is an editor at the New York Observer and a former editor at Gawker.com. She has also contributed to Slate.

Jessica Grose is Managing Editor for Double X, Slate's blog for women, and was formerly an editor at Jezebel.com. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times and Salon.com, among other places.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion (March 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401323421
• ISBN-13: 978-1401323424
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #790,652 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm a writer and editor at Slate. I live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan. Permanent fascinations include true crime, powerful ladies, pandas.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sweet, Funny, and Universal Notes from All Kinds of Moms, March 30, 2009

By 

Rachel Kramer Bussel "Cupcakes Take the Cake ... (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Love, Mom: Poignant, Goofy, Brilliant Messages from Home (Hardcover)

Reading these emails is somewhat like taking a tour through "cyberspace," circa the 1990's. In many of these notes, moms make goofy allusions to various forms of technology. In others, they find new and invasive ways of keeping up with their children. Some are very short and sweet, and others reveal things that moms might not be able to share with their adult kids in any other form. It's a perfect gift for a mom (or grandmother, even), but what's genius about it is that even the most tech-savvy blogger type will also get a chuckle or five out of these motherly mash notes. You're very likely to recognize your own mom in these emails...or be grateful you were spared some of these probing "I've been reading your blog" type notes.

Fans of Postcards from Yo Mamma and new readers will enjoy this; seeing all the entries together is a reminder that checking up on one's kids is pretty universal, as is mothers not letting propriety or anything else stop them from having their say.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hilarious!, May 4, 2009

By 

Linda (Maui, HI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love, Mom: Poignant, Goofy, Brilliant Messages from Home (Hardcover)

This was a gift from one of my grown daughters, and how appropriate! Emails have become the primary form of communication today for a lot of us since most people have become so busy with family, career, and are always on the go; there's not always time for a catching-up telephone call. Some of these are sweet, some make absolutely no sense, some give advice or note the goings-on of the day, and others are just, well, emails.

Be sure to buy the hardcover instead of the Kindle edition. The quality of the paper, 6" x 7" size, and different fonts make it a very special eye-catching book, suitable for a coffee or end table for just picking up and browsing.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Moms love it, June 26, 2009

By 

Heather Lefebvre - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Love, Mom: Poignant, Goofy, Brilliant Messages from Home (Hardcover)

I bought this book as a Mother's Day present. My mom had never heard of it -- like many of the mothers in this book, she is not too hip to the Internet (outside of YouTube and checking her email that is) -- but she loves it now. I can tell because she keeps laughing aloud as she reads and saying, "See, it's not just me!" She thinks it's hysterical, but at the same time the nature of the book, that it looks into other people's relationships with their mother, gives her a new advantage whenever we argue. She can point to the book and say, "I'm not that bad!"

The gist: if you have a mother, or mother figure, buy this book. Unless you're quite argumentative and don't want to lose, that is.