Father and Go the Fuck to Sleep author Adam Mansbach talks to us about his children’s book for adults and why it has struck such a chord. We also talk about his other works of literary fiction and the path that led him to his life as a writer and artist.
When Adam Mansbach’s daughter, Vivien, was 3 years old, she would take up to four hours to fall asleep. Exhausted and exasperated, one night Mansbach posted a note on Facebook, “Look out for my forthcoming children’s book, Go the Fuck to Sleep“. Following his Facebook post, friends of Mansbach responded enthusiastically, so that the writer began working on what was then only a hypothetical book.
Go the Fuck to Sleep eventually became a sensation – a best-selling bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, it captures the familiar — and unspoken — tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. Beautiful, subversive, and pants-wettingly funny, Go the Fuck to Sleep is a book for parents new, old, and expectant. You probably should not play this for your children.
Adam Mansbach is no one-hit wonder. His novels include The End of the Jews, winner of the California Book Award, and the best-selling Angry Black White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Believer, Granta, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He is the 2010-2011 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University.
City Dads Group columnist and L.A. Dads Group member Whit Honea drops in again to give parents some unique advice for when kids test out those very colorful four-letter words.
