Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces, Michael Chabon, review: Essay collection explores how to be a father to teenagers

Michael Chabon opens his new essay collection, Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces, with the recollection that just before he published his first novel, an older male writer offered him a piece of advice: “Don’t have children.”

Chabon didn’t listen to this counsel – he went on to have four – but neither did his career suffer: he’s also the proud author of 14 books. “Should there be eighteen?” he wonders, a reference to the Richard Yates’s assertion that one loses a book for every child.

Even if that’s the case, Chabon doesn’t mourn his “lost” books, or begrudge his children those vanished hours. It’s Chabon as loving, slightly sentimental father – not critically acclaimed writer – who describes how his kids continue to hold “wonder” for him long after his books do, and how it’s them who “love him back,” not the words on the page.

Women writers are turning their attention to motherhood right now in their droves: the second volume of Deborah Levy’s memoir, The Cost of Living, touches on it; it lies at the heart of Lara Feigel’s bibliomemoir, Free Woman; Jacqueline Rose’s new book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty examines how we makes mothers into scapegoats for a multitude of sins. There’s Meaghan O’Connell’s straight-talking And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready; Anna Prushinskaya’s essay collection A Woman is Only a Woman Until She is a Mother, and not forgetting Sheila Heti’s new novel, Motherhood, an exercise in auto-fiction in which Heti grapples with the decision of whether or not to have a child.

These women are wrestling with parenthood – both its physical demands and its cultural meaning – in a way we rarely see in the work of male writers who are also fathers. On first glance, Pops suggests that it might be a first step towards redressing this balance, but on closer look, it’s actually a very different beast to those described above.

For one, Chabon isn’t writing about the heady days of new parenthood. He’s writing about his kids as teenagers, the emphasis being on his responsibility to ready them for making their way in the world. He writes about having to teach his older son, “along with everything else – the rules of consent, the imperatives of sexual reciprocity, the fundamental principle of equality … not to be a d*** to girls,” and about encouraging his children to embrace their own individual sense of identity, much of which hinges on what they wear. Luckily for them, he explains, their hometown of Berkley, California, is decidedly more open that most to all kinds of sartorial weirdness.

Fashion also takes centre stage in the essay ‘Little Man’, in which Chabon describes taking his clothes-obsessed 13-year-old son Abe to Men’s Fashion Week in Paris. It’s both a fascinating take on its subject and brilliantly written, but what’s more, the care Chabon takes with his subject – that where Abe’s heart lies, not Chabon’s own – ensures it’s steeped in parental love without ever being gushing.

Read the book for this gem of a piece alone. It’s that good.

'Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces' is published by Fourth Estate