Transcript
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Apple Representative (1:01)
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Sarah Austin Janess (1:42)
Welcome to the Moth Radio hour from PRX I. Hi, I'm Sarah Austin Jeness. The first Moth night was in the summer of 1997 and we've been gathering for these events in bars and churches, community rooms and grand theater spaces ever since. At a Moth, people stand on stage one by one to tell true and personal stories in front of people they don't know. So in the same night you might have a grandma, a Nobel laureate, Moby, a voodoo priestess and a nurse. The nights are filled with bravery, heartbreak, belly laughs, and they're a lot of fun in this hour, kicking things off with a bang. Adam Mansbach. Adam has told versions of this story at Moth events all around the country with us. So this is Adam Mansbach live at the moth in Denver, Colorado.
Apple Representative (2:35)
It's November to 2011 and I am the most controversial parent in America by virtue of a short, obscene fake children's book by the name of Go the Fuck to sleep. It's 14 stanzas long. I wrote it in 39 minutes with no pants on. Now, I'm a literary novelist by trade, so the manner in which this particular creation of mine ascended into the Zeitgeist was perplexing to me, to say the least. All I was trying to do in this book is simply capture the interior monologue of a parent attempting to put a child to bed. My daughter Vivian, my lovely, beautiful, wonderful, amazing daughter. Vivian was two and a half at the time and sleeping was low on her list of priorities. I would sometimes be in her room for two, two and a half hours. This gets tedious after a while. And I just wanted to capture the paradox of the fact that on one hand you can love a kid to death, and on the other hand, be so desperate to get out of that room after the first hour that like, you know, like, if Don Corleone walked in the room and is like, I'll put the child to bed, but you'll have to do a service for me one day, and this day may never come. Whatever, Don Corleone, just take this baby, you know. So I read the book for the first time in public at a museum in Philadelphia six months before the book was supposed to be published. It was part of an evening of short performances, 10 minute performances, there were like 50 of them. And I went on last after a 94 year old tap dancer. And you really never want to follow a 94 year old, you know what I mean? Like not on the road, not on stage, just never. And I get on there and I read the book to maybe 200 people and the response is good, but I don't think much of it. I go home and I go to sleep and when I wake up the next morning, Go the Fuck to sleep is ranked 125th on Amazon. Now, as a literary writer, I didn't even know they made numbers that low. And by the end of the week, the book has shot up to number one. I don't want to get overly technical here, but the book does not exist and is not going to exist for some months. So we very quickly rush it toward production with the hope of getting it out into the world by Father's Day. I don't even know what's funny about that. Meanwhile, however, a PDF of the book that we have put together leaks and starts ricocheting around the Internet and lands in hundreds of thousands of people's mailboxes. We had put this together because we wanted to send it to booksellers. We thought it might be something of an uphill battle getting booksellers to stock, much less support, a book called Go the Fuck to Sleep. So hundreds of thousands of people are getting the book for free and we're panicking. We're thinking that we're not gonna sell a single book. Luckily for us, it's Bad for him to show up at a baby shower with a low resolution, printed out, you know, stapled together PDF and be like, here, it's such a wonderful time in your life, you know, But I mean, things are going crazy. A woman in Australia has posted the entire book as a Facebook album and all this trash is going to her Facebook page. So I write her an email. I'm like, you know, the book hasn't come out yet. Please take this down. We'd like to sell a couple books when the book is available. And she's like, I'll take it down if you want, but I want you to know that 500 people have contacted me since yesterday asking where they can buy the book. And I'm sending them to Amazon. I'm like, okay, that's cool. Forget I asked. So we weather the storm and the book comes out and it debuts at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. And Samuel Jackson reads the audiobook, probably his best work since Pulp Fiction. And you know, all of this craziness is just unending. There's a group in New Zealand that wants to censor the book and they put out a press release that says, while this book may be fine and even harmless in the hands of normal, well adjusted parents, it could pose a real danger to children. In the hands of irresponsible, maladjusted parents, I'm like, yeah, but in the hands of irresponsible, maladjusted parents, like a spoon is a danger to children. They didn't really catch much momentum on the boycott. But the weirdest thing of all for me is that I'm sort of thrown into a crisis because suddenly and inexplicably I'm being positioned as a parenting expert. I'm getting emails from people thanking me for saving their marriages, and also from people who are furious and irate and saying things like, I would never read this book to a child. It would take a very specific blend of literacy and illiteracy to mistakenly read this book to a child. But I feel like I've got to ride the gravy train. And if I'm going to be a fake parenting expert and feed my family, that's fine with me. I'll do it. But it's actually disturbing to me because all of the publicity and the rigmarole around this book is actually meaning that I'm not spending much time at all with my child. So not only do I feel like I'm not a parenting expert, I feel like I might not even be a decent parent. I'm on the road all the time. When I am home, I'm on the phone eight hours, 10 hours a day, answering the same five questions from media around the world. And all of this kind of came to a boil and gained a particular focus when I was asked to host a fundraiser for a Boston children's hospital in Los Angeles. People in Los Angeles have more money, I guess. So they offered to fly me and my family to Los Angeles for the weekend, put us up in a hotel where John Wayne had once kept a cow. They were going to give away copies of the book, and all I had to do was shake hands and sign books and imbibe alcoholic beverages. I can do those things. So I say, cool, and we go to la and I get to the fundraiser, at which point I find out that I am co hosting this fundraiser with another controversial luminary of parenting, Dr. Richard Ferber. Oh, you know Dr. Ferber. For those who don't, Dr. Ferber is a guy who wrote a book called the Ferber Method. It's a sleep training concept. In essence, Dr. Ferber's method stipulates that if your child is crying, you ignore that child, you let them cry it out, thus teaching them to self soothe. And also that the world is a cold, horrible place populated by people who only pretend to love them. The opposite of the fervor method, what we were practicing with Vivian is called attachment parenting. Attachment parenting dictates that when your child makes a peep, a whimper, the slightest sound, you rush into their room, grab them, cradle them in your arms, tell them that you love them, thus ensuring that they will sleep in your bed until they are ready to leave for college. So I wasn't really sure how this fundraiser was going to go, But I meet Dr. Ferber. He's a nice, avuncular Jewish man. Could have been my own uncle. We have a nice chat, and then the fundraiser commences and I begin to drink. Dr. Furber's role, however, was a little more involved. It turned out that he was there to give a slideshow. So as a heavy level of inebriation set in on the crowd. And also it should tell you something about my mind state at this point that a night hobnobbing with rich, decadent, drunken Los Angelenos sounded like a night off to me. You know what I mean? So at the moment when Everybody's had maybe three cocktails, Dr. Ferber pulls a screen down and begins to give a lengthy, highly detailed slideshow about how to put a baby to sleep. The problem is that he and I are probably the only people here who've ever put a baby to sleep because the rest of these people have nannies who do that, so nobody's really interested. The highlight of the slideshow comes when a picture of me from go the fuck to sleep flashes on the screen. It's me sneaking out of a child's room and Dr. Ferber's like, this right here, this is what you should never do. This is completely wrong. I'm like, Dr. Ferber just threw me under the sleep training bus. And everybody turns to look at me and I'm just. I keep drinking. I go back to my hotel room and I wake up the next morning and I find in my inbox an email from Dr. Richard Ferber. And the subject heading of the email is, why didn't you tell me that I know you? I'm like, Dr. Ferber has lost his mind. Then I open the email and my mind is blown because it turns out that unbeknownst to me, I went to summer camp with Dr. Ferber's son, the unforgettably named Thad Ferber. He and I were friends and camp mates until I got kicked out of the camp and he lived like two towns over from me, which at 13 means you only see that dude like once a year. But in 1990, the play date I had with Thad Ferber consisted of a trip to Tower Records on Newbury street in Boston to buy rap records. I was a DJ and an emcee and this is what I did. We get to Tower Records and find that the rap section is being guarded by a life sized cardboard cutout of MC Hammer, who was himself a very controversial figure in 1990, not considered to be the most authentic dude by hardcore hip hoppers like myself. So naturally, I rip the head off of the cardboard cutout and stuff it into my jacket. Not in an act of theft as much as decapitation. And I attempt to sneak out of Tower Records and Thad Ferber and I are accosted and captured by Tower Records security. And Thad Ferber, who's guilty only by association, and I are taken down into the dungeon deep in the bowels of Tower Records, where we are seated, informed that the cardboard cutout of MC Hammer is worth $5,000, which seems spurious in retrospect, and told that we will be released only into police or parental custody. Now, this is not my first rodeo. I got in trouble all the time. This was like a regular Tuesday for me. So I gave the Tower Records police a phone number That I had memorized for occasions such as this one that I knew through trial and error just right rang and rang and rang and nobody ever picked up. And there was no answering machine.