New Shel Silverstein Biography

Here's an enticing review of a Shel Silverstein biography entitled "Silverstein and Me" by Marv Gold. Besides writing those big, amazing volumes of poetry for kids, he lived at the Playboy Mansion and penned "A Boy Named Sue" (Tomi Ungerer, another children's author, also drew cartoon erotica). According to Gold, Shel had no ambition but lots of lofty dreams, spent one stint in the army, three at colleges, and two years in jail for smuggling hash from Marrakesh.

Why do freaks make such good children's authors? Shel Silverstein's demented poems (extra-demented when he reads them aloud: take it from someone who owns "A Light in the Attic on cassette tape) really appeal to kids. But Silverstein did know the power of a book like "The Giving Tree" or a poem like this:

Listen to the MUSTN'TS


Listen to the MUSTN'TS, child,

Listen to the DON'TS

Listen to the SHOULDN'TS

The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON'TS

Listen to the NEVER HAVES

Then listen close to me--

Anything can happen, child,

ANYTHING can be.

THE WRONG MOTHER!

I picked up the Wrong Mother by Sophie Hannah hoping for something really satisfying, a violent demonstration of motherly problems often written about more quietly in novels. "Say something nasty about a child-- even if it's true, and even if it's your own child-- and there's hell to pay" (NY Times). There's plenty of punishment in the Wrong Mother, in which three women-- one dead, one missing, one narrating (sometimes)-- find themselves in maternal entrapment that goes unseen and unexperienced by their husbands. Enslaved by unreasonable and helplessly selfish children, these mothers are forbidden to strike back when wronged. Their private systems of martyrdom and punishment start to become real with the murder (or suicide?) of model mother Geraldine Bretherick and her daughter, Lucy. As the grisly mysteries are parsed, so is the grisly career of motherhood. Sophie Hannah's book is carried along by its light and nasty humor. Even though The Wrong Mother is extremely funny, it successfully disturbed me.