THE high-achieving mother publicly laid out her methods, strict and punishing. She wrote of how her young daughter, told that she needed to change, resisted, rebelled, sometimes threw a tantrum. But in the end, the mother proclaimed, her tactics triumphed.
Amy Chua may have to hand off the title of Tiger Mother to Dara-Lynn Weiss, whose article in the April issue of Vogue painfully detailed her effort to get her 7-year-old daughter, Bea, to lose weight.
Alarmed that Bea, at 4 feet 4 inches tall and 93 pounds, had developed habits like scarfing down “adult-size plates of food” and failing to “self-regulate” at the preschool snack table, Ms. Weiss placed her on a strict diet, cutting the size of her dinners in half and banning almost all desserts.
“I once reproachfully deprived Bea of her dinner after learning that her observation of French Heritage Day at school involved nearly 800 calories of Brie, filet mignon, baguette and chocolate,” she wrote. “I stopped letting her enjoy Pizza Fridays when she admitted to adding a corn salad as a side dish one week.”
On the Internet, Ms. Weiss was quickly excoriated as one of the most “selfish women to ever grace the magazine’s pages,” wrote Katie J. M. Baker in a widely distributed post on Jezebel that drew more than 600 comments. ABC News sternly reported that “Mom’s Diet for 7-Year-Old Daughter in ‘Vogue’ Sparks Backlash.”
Ms. Weiss had her defenders: Some online commenters praised her for tackling her daughter’s weight issues, pointing out that it was Bea’s doctor who said that there was a problem. Others wondered if her frank discussion of it made Ms. Weiss appear tone deaf. (Bea “didn’t strike anyone as ‘obese,’ but, in truth, I liked that the word carries a scary, diagnostic tone,” Ms. Weiss wrote.) One commenter on nymag.com wrote, “I’m pretty sure Weiss just handed her daughter the road map to all her future eating disorders.”
Then on Monday, Random House made an announcement that dumped gasoline on the flames: Ms. Weiss had scored a book contract.
“Fat-Shaming a Child Into a Book Deal,” a headline on Salon huffed in protest.
“So that’s how you get a book published, ladies,” Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote on Salon. “Just write an article about what a mean mommy you are, get a lot of sexy media attention and hate mail for it, and watch the bidding war commence!”
It was bad enough, the thinking went, to write about your daughter and her weight problems in Vogue, possibly the spiritual home of the eating disorder. But to get a book deal out of it?
Yet anyone who observed the literary phenomenon that was “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” by Ms. Chua, published last year by the Penguin Press, knows that if there was ever a time when parenting books had to be calm and gentle, with soothing advice for sorting out the mysteries of rearing children, this is not it.
Ms. Chua’s book, which sold more than 150,000 print copies, signaled a modern approach to the genre: outing yourself as a more unyielding kind of parent, the type who makes her daughter practice piano for hours every day or dresses her down in front of her friends for coveting that second cupcake at a birthday party.
When Ann Godoff, the president and editor in chief of the Penguin Press, first read the manuscript of “Tiger Mother,” she knew it wasn’t a typical guide to parenting.
“At the very start, I just thought it was a hell of a good book,” Ms. Godoff said in an interview. “What it became was a new kind of parenting memoir.”
Alisa Schnaars, a buyer at Barnes & Noble who orders titles on parenting, said that before Ms. Chua’s book, she couldn’t remember a book in the genre that had so inflamed the public.
Before “Tiger Mother,” the category was dominated by “more of a Hallmark vision of parenting,” Ms. Schnaars said. “It was very ‘Here are the challenges and here’s how we overcame them, and everybody lived happily ever after.’ ”
After “Tiger Mother,” she said, the doors opened to books like Ms. Weiss’s, the ones that don’t try to be soft.
These days, the parenting books crowding the front tables at Barnes & Noble tend to have an element of tough love, the accounts of parents who — even if they don’t qualify as Tiger Mothers — learn to impose suddenly harsh restrictions on food when the family moved to France, for example, as in “French Kids Eat Everything,” by Karen Le Billon, which will be published on Tuesday by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins.
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