Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Radio commentator and performer Loh (A Year in Van Nuys) has penned a hilarious memoir with the same title as her one-woman comedy show, which ran for seven months in Los Angeles. The story begins as a droll little breeze that soon sucks the reader into a frenzied whirlwind as Loh recounts her harrowing quest to find a suitable kindergarten for Hannah, her four-year-old daughter (Loh habitually calls Isabel, her two-year-old, simply The Squid). Spurned by the local Lutheran school (which deems the precocious Hannah not developmentally ready), Loh vaults from pricey and competitive private institutions to public school settings, discovering that the chances of Hannah making it into the desirable public magnet school are minuscule, and only one in 20 is admitted to the idyllic private school, Wonder Canyon, which costs $22,500 per year. Loh is prone to insomnia, expletives (she's fired from her radio spot for using the F word on air), panic (panic attacks are my booster rockets) and exaggeration as she grapples with rejection, middle age, friendship, a clueless but lovable guitar-playing husband and a brilliant but eccentric Chinese father. All parents who have searched for an ideal school for their youngster (and even those who haven't) will be snared by Loh's crackling prose. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Lydia Millet

In 2004, Sandra Tsing Loh became something of a free-speech cause celebre when she was fired by a Santa Monica-based NPR station because of an obscenity in her on-air commentary. And the incident garnered something more coveted than fame: a spot for her daughter in an exclusive Los Angeles-area kindergarten. But there was a catch: the school's annual tuition, a whopping $22,500. "My Grrrrl power-like battle cry," Loh writes, "devolved to the far less glamorous, 'I am a Celebrity Mom . . . who needs financial aid.' "

This is one of the myriad frustrations Loh recounts in her new memoir, Mother on Fire, a droll rant about her experience navigating the maze of school options for her 4-year-old daughter. The book, based on her one-woman show of the same title, made me laugh out loud more than once. Particularly good is Loh's rendition of conversations with yuppie parents whining about the difficulty of finding kindergartens in L.A. worthy of their allegedly gifted children: "It's very HARD for gifted children!" she quotes one mother saying.

Loh's greatest strengths are these snippets of dialogue and her blunt, funny characterizations of both her own foibles and those of the many other mothers she encounters. She's also witty in characterizing those close to her, including her 85-year-old Chinese father, whom she describes with loving irreverence:

"In addition to the grocery bags on his back, my father is carrying his customary old wrinkled white plastic UCLA bag of what appear to be toiletries. He attaches it to himself by means of a yellow-and-blue bungee cord he found on the beach. Straining forward with the bungee cord around his neck, he looks like Jack LaLanne pulling a tugboat, except that the UCLA bag he is carrying is no larger than the size of a small airline pillow and is about as heavy as a bag filled with Kleenex. Which it may well be. My father hates to waste paper by blowing his nose into a tissue just once."

Loh, who has written four previous books, including A Year in Van Nuys and If You Lived Here, You'd be Home by Now, is not 100-percent politically correct, and she doesn't pull punches. ("Oh my GOD! . . . We are SUCH IMMIGRANTS!!!" she writes of an incident involving her father and the crumpled dollar bills he carries in that grocery bag.) She uses capital letters and exclamation points liberally, a tic that at first struck me as high-schoolish but that came to acquire the comforting rhythm of an ironic code.

The memoir lags every now and then in places where Loh presents herself delivering lengthy diatribes to other people she meets -- in full and complex phrases that could never fall trippingly off the tongue in unpremeditated fashion -- on subjects such as the evils of the baby boom generation. "You boomers have presided over the greatest decline, the greatest return to public-school segregation in U.S. history. Consumers rather than citizens -- it is entirely your doing!" she orates to her shrink.

While she's not afraid to touch on issues of class and race in a way that's both humorous and trenchant, Loh sidesteps the questions that anyone with an even moderately feminist perspective on contemporary parenting should raise. The matter of mother-father divisions of labor, for example, is a source of resentment and turmoil for the 30- and 40-something mothers I know. Its absence here is an odd omission. Loh's musician husband, the affable but somewhat-incompetent-at-parental-tasks Mike, disappears for months on tour in the middle of the narrative -- as musicians must, certainly -- but Loh mentions his absenteeism during the all-consuming school search only in passing.

And there's a certain unfortunate NPR-ness -- an assurance that "It's all OK, everything's nice and homey in the end" -- that attends Loh's ultimate epiphany about public schools, where her daughter ends up: that these schools, held up by women who love their children, are the places to be. Beholding public-school-like diversity around the city, Loh writes with apparent earnestness: "There is grace all around me. The universe hums -- the invisible web." This is a comedian best served hot, not hokey.

But in the end, funny trumps all, and Mother on Fire offers much to entertain the many mothers among us.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1 edition (August 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609608134
• ISBN-13: 978-0609608135
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #374,061 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars CRACKED ME UP!, August 15, 2008

By	Honor Bret Harte (California) - See all my reviews

I read all the "motherhood" books, and they're usually so serious and dry. This one is hilarious! It's like the books my mom used to read about the subject - really funny, and (I know this sounds kind of sappy) uplifting. I'm going to suggest it at my next book group meeting - we need a laugh!

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy this for your women friends instead of more scented soap, August 17, 2008

By	Anthro Mom (Riverside, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Once again, Sandra Tsing Loh has massaged her very specific life into themes that touch the heart, providing plenty of laughs but also a lot to think about. With witty side trips, the author takes us on an invigorating journey from the sweet exhaustion of keeping up with small children through the frantic exhaustion of trying to find a decent school, and ends up with a new sense of purpose and community. Buy it; read it aloud if you can stop laughing; buy more for your friends!

Favorite theme: "It seems there's no rite of female passage that can't be marked, in some vague way, by a little hay-strewn basket of bath items. As if to say 'Happy Graduation! Have a bath.' 'So you're thirty-seven! Have a bath.' 'Wishing you a fabulous divorce, and menopause! Rock on, sister, and ... try a bath.'" Watch how deftly this becomes a manifesto against Women as Mere Consumers.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Side-splitting, August 30, 2008

By	D. C. Carrad "augustabookman" (Augusta, GA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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Very, very funny and well-written. Ms. Tsing-Loh does satire, irony and self-deprecation much better than she does anger. The book is hilarious up to the last two chapters which fall flat and should have been omitted and one does sense in them more than a faint whiff of sour grapes. The NPR ending is in retrospect inevitable, but buy the book and enjoy it!