The happy hypocrite

It has also brought them lives in which they are in no condition to battle breast cancer, as she did. "To Hell With All That" ends with a creepy conclusion, in which she describes her diagnosis, her treatment and her recovery. Midway through the chapter, a gripping story nicely rendered becomes a scary Soviet propaganda pamphlet. Almost dying taught Flanagan not tolerance, not mystery, but absolutism. Her writing devolves into ranting:

"The only thing you can protect your children from is the bad behavior of their parents.

"The only thing I can promise my boys is that in this house the parents won't yell at each other or treat each other poorly. They won't become drunks or run off with lovers. In this house the parents will act like adults. They will take the children to church; they will set an example; they will be present in every moment of their lives. Only death can part us from them."

Suddenly we're reading a manifesto. You can imagine Flanagan reciting this credo to ward off her fear of dying and leaving her kids motherless, and for a time your heart goes out to her. But it's got none of the loveliness or sense of wonder of a prayer. Then it gets even worse. A short paragraph explaining that her husband took care of the boys and carried her to the doctor when she was sick is interrupted with what feels like a non sequitur. "If that's a traditional marriage, I'll take it." She explains her reasoning thusly:

"If a marriage is like a bank account, filled not only with affection but also with a commitment to the other person's well-being as much as to one's own, I suppose my balance was high. I suppose that all the days I had made a home for my husband, and all the times I had ended my writing days early so that he could work late or come home to a hot dinner and not to a scene of domestic chaos -- all of that, as much as the desire and intensity that originally brought us together, were stores in my account." And she ends the book this way: "Here's what I know: When I woke up from the final surgery, I didn't want to see the articles I've written or the editors I've worked for. I wanted to see my sons and my husband. And I wanted to go home."

Here's what I know: This is one confused book, and one confused author (and admittedly, one confused reviewer as well). What are we to make of it? From the flippant "inner housewife" subtitle to the faux-'50s cover art, "To Hell With All That" bills itself as a continuation of the witty, breezy, entertainingly contrarian writing she pioneered in the Atlantic and the New Yorker, but the book is a strident attack on feminism and a paean to traditional marriage. What's going on here?

My inner superstitious Irish Catholic girl winces at the hubris of Flanagan's crediting her care for her family with her husband's willingness to nurse her through cancer. I immediately thought of Jackie Gingrich, Newt's first wife, who was served with divorce papers by her cheating husband while in the hospital after cancer surgery. Did Jackie Gingrich fail to deposit enough in their marital bank account? Of course not. All over the world, there are feminists with cancer being cared for by loving husbands, girlfriends, siblings, children; sadly, there are also traditional wives who've been abandoned by their husbands at the first sign of illness; there are good men being treated badly by bad women, and bad women being treated well by good men. In short, there's every kind of blessing in the world alongside every kind of heartbreak, and all I know for sure is that to credit your own behavior for what is essentially good luck and someone else's kindness is asking for what's called karma, and not the good kind.

And yet while Flanagan has blamed feminism for causing women "heartache," it's worth saying that there's an awful lot of heartache in her writing -- and most of it, given her self-proclaimed happiness with her traditional role, is her own. Almost every piece in the book makes reference to her depression. Being home with her two babies was "mildly depressing," she admits in the opening of her "Serfdom" essay in the Atlantic. In her "Executive Child" chapter she refers to the "low-level depression" she suffered the first year of motherhood. In "That's My Woman," the chapter on her tortured relationship with her nanny, Paloma, she describes "an emotional weariness that I would recognize as depression years later" along with an unrelenting "loneliness and exhaustion." Things do get better as the boys get older -- she gets them into toddler classes, and then they learn how to talk. "By the time they turned two, my mood lifted considerably," she confesses. The first time she sneezes, and one of them says, "Bless you," she tells us, "I realized that what my shrink had been telling me every week was in fact true: the babies would get older, things would get easier."

It's worth breaking those references down into even a little bit more detail. Yes, the at-home mother had a full-time nanny for her twins. Still, she insists she didn't really do much work in that time, she wouldn't let herself, she was too busy sulking about how her sons were going to love Paloma more than they loved her. Luckily, she begins to come out of her depression around the time the boys could talk -- kids do get a lot more amusing at that age -- and eases Paloma out the door, just in time for Conor and Patrick to spend half their days in preschool, and her magazine career takes off. It's hard not to conclude that when a mother has a nanny but still (supposedly) doesn't work, something is also lost, but I'm not sure what it is. The mother's sanity? Maybe. The right to brag about being a full-time stay-at-home mother, who bathed her children in full-time mother love? Definitely.

Next page: Is Flanagan trying to fool her publishers, her readers, or is she fooling herself with this at-home mother shtick?