Brett Paesel has acted in several
TV shows, including Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Gilmore Girls,
and The Real Live Brady Bunch, and she is married to actor Pat Towne,
who is also a TV actor.  Yet she has in recent years spent more time writing
and mothering.  While she loves her children, she does not completely endorse
all the cultural ideals that go along with being a mother.  She does not
identify with many other mothers, and is bemused by the expectations that
others have of her.  It’s not that she wants to be Courtney Love, but she does
want to have some time off from being a mother.  She feels guilty if she has a
couple of glasses of wine and half a cigarette, and she wonders if she is
abnormal for wanting childbirth to be as painless as possible.  Her book Mommies
Who Drink is a collection of reflections and stories from her life as a
mother.  You might think of it as Sex in the City for young mothers, set
in LA.

Paesel’s stories are amusing, and
occasionally really funny.  She is at her best when she is being flippant and
belligerent.  Occasionally she balances her doubts with earnest avowals of the
joys of motherhood, which do not carry so much conviction.  It is a little
shocking when she says she wistfully says she would like to combine motherhood
with occasionally taking cocaine, and it is that sort of thing that makes the
book distinctive.  Her regularly Friday meetings with her friends at a bar give
the book a nice pace, and we get a strong sense of the warmth of those
relationships.  We hear far less about her husband and virtually nothing about
the rest of her family.  Most of the stories are similar in tone, and they tend
to merge into each other.  This is not a book that demands careful attention,
and this may make it especially attractive to busy new mothers who hardly have
time to finish a whole chapter.  Paesel performs the reading of the unabridged
audiobook, and her acting skills help greatly.  It is a good book to listen to
while cooking or driving. 

Link: http://www.mommieswhodrink.net/

© 2006 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online Reviews.  His main
research is on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: AudioBooks, Memoirs