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How to Baby: A No-Advice-Given Guide to Motherhood, with Drawings

by Liana Finck

A graphic memoir of early motherhood, with cartoons, essays, and lists

Regular price $22.67 USD
Regular price $37.79 USD Sale price $22.67 USD
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Hardcover New English

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Awards & Recognition

  • Editorial selection

    A New Yorker Best Book of the Year

    Named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year.

AlbakiReads Editorial

A graphic memoir of early motherhood, with cartoons, essays, and lists

Liana Finck uses the framework of a parenting guide to map the disorienting first years of motherhood without presenting a fixed set of instructions. Drawings sit alongside comic essays, mock-practical lists, and personal observations about pregnancy, birth preparation, shifting friendships, family boundaries, household conflict, insurance frustrations, and the pressure of developmental milestones. The book’s structure makes room for both the logistical burdens of caring for a baby and the larger changes in identity, partnership, and attachment that accompany new parenthood. Its humor is directed at the expectations and advice surrounding mothers as much as at the daily absurdities themselves.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Parents interested in graphic memoirs about pregnancy and early motherhood
  • Fans of cartoon-based personal essays and observational humor
  • Readers seeking a candid look at parenting advice, milestones, and family dynamics

Themes

Early motherhoodPregnancy and parenthoodParenting expectationsPartnership and family boundariesIdentity and care work

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

A wryly personal and deeply relatable graphic memoir skewering the "traditional" parenting book to chronicle the absurdities, frustrations, and soaring joys of new parenthood--from the acclaimed New Yorker cartoonist and author

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR


How do you know if you're ready to have a baby? How do you know if you might be pregnant? And how do you deal with peeing all the time and being hungry all the time and fielding well-meaning but kind of insulting advice and finding a doula and being dropped by your old friends and learning why it's called mom brain and not dad brain and the tyranny of the milestones you're not meeting and negotiating boundaries with in-laws and realizing that your heart now exists outside of your chest and in the body of this tiny little being whose entire existence depends on the quality of your care?

To tackle these questions and many others, award-winning cartoonist and memoirist Liana Finck began illustrating her early years of motherhood, giving images and language to her insecurities, frustrations, and wild joy.

In How to Baby, Liana takes her witty and lacerating cartoons ("Hobbies for Pregnant Women: Waiting on Hold with the Insurance Company") and weaves them together with comic essays ("You Married a Brute. Worse. You're a Nag: Go Ahead and Argue with Each Other"), handy lists ("Nesting. The Comprehensive List of What to Buy and Why Getting Things Used Is Dangerous and Unamerican"), and profound observations. Together, these brilliant pieces form an immersive and comprehensive narrative whole--a baby book, a resource, and an emotional balm--for our time.
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