By host Tom Ashbrook:
Novelist, satirist, blogger, and sometime rocker Neal Pollack never put “daddy-hood” at the top of his Gen X priority list. He was a hipster, a late night guy who liked the rough side, a literary player, an author-provocateur, a committed citizen of counter-culture, alternative-culture, and anything but the paycheck mainstream.
Then came love and marriage — and the baby — little Elijah, who needed diapers and burping and silly songs and a lot of things that weren’t on the Pollack’s alt-culture playlist.
And the crunch began — the hipster lifestyle versus parenthood on the economy’s unforgiving edge.
This hour On Point: Neal Pollack and his new memoir, “Alternadad.”
Quotes from the Show:
“It is hard to be a middle-class parent in this country right now. Health insurance is hard to come by; affordable decent housing is hard to come; it’s sometimes hard to find decent preschools for your kids. …So the book is in part a story about hipster parent subculture but it’s a lot about just an ordinary family trying to get by.” Neal Pollack
“I wasn’t really reluctant for the responsibility, the diapers or the sort of day-to-day workings of a parent. What I didn’t want to give up was the sort of cultural trappings of my life before having a kid — the music, the movies, the video games, the pop-culture that I’d been immersed in since I was a kid, especially because it seemed to me a lot of the culture available to parents and kids was just lame.” Neal Pollack
“There’s no reluctance to surrender to the child — this generation of parents is as responsible and caring as any other generation of parents — but I think there is a reluctance to submerge yourself in child obsessiveness. I think that there’s a reaction ongoing to the completely child-centric culture of the 80s and 90s and there’s a sort of ‘do it yourself’ aspect to parenting culture right now.” Neal Pollack
Guests:
Neal Pollack, author of the memoir “Alternadad.”;
Jill Hudson Neal, Fashion and Desion Editor for Washington Post Sunday Magazine and columnist for the “Still Me: The Cool Mom’s Guide to Staying Hip” online column
