D R A M A++Q U E E N

What's the sleaziest thing you've ever done? Come clean in Drama Queen for a Day
(04/14/98)

T A B L E++T A L K

Dude, it's da bomb! A confused parent requests help understanding her teen's jargon-laden vocabulary. Help her in the Mothers area of Table Talk

SCENES FROM A SHAKE-'N-BAKE LIFE | PAGE 2 OF 2

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Winik is at her best when she's writing frankly and vividly about subjects that would make other writers -- and parents -- squeamish. Like how to talk to kids about sex and drugs. She devotes a chapter, "Our Bodies, Their Selves," to parental nudity. When her older son asks to touch her vagina, she is flustered, but not for long. "Well, durn, Hayes, as they say down here in Texas, I don't think so," Winik writes. "In fact I'm quite sure not."

Winik's candor is fresh and attractive. She is up front with everything from her children's sexuality to her own PMS-fueled anger. This is not a woman with deeply buried "issues." Winik slaps her son when he's driving her nuts, burns with shame -- and forgives herself. She's aging hard and can't find the time to moisturize -- but heck, that's OK too. She prefers one of her boyfriend's daughters to the other -- but that's life. She is an intelligent woman who can no longer focus on the New Yorker at the end of the day -- and happily picks up a collection of Erma Bombeck instead.

Which brings us to the question of how Winik measures up to the woman on whose work she has modeled her own. If you, like me, haven't read Bombeck lately (if ever), it will come as a surprise. Bombeck of the frosted hair and cheesy book titles ("Family: the Ties That Bind ... and Gag!") was sly, subversive and stunningly smart. She could find dramatic tension in the most humdrum household event; she could evoke the humor, loneliness, boredom and pleasure of parenthood in the course of a single sentence. Yes, Winik has written an easygoing, likable book. But where is the dramatic tension? Where is the conflict? Where is the bite?

Winik can't hide her delight in her children; Bombeck didn't even try to disguise a certain restlessness. Of her postnatal depression, Bombeck wrote: "Had it not been for 'As the World Turns' and pacifiers, I'd have slipped into humming and braiding my hair. Every day I'd put a pacifier into whatever part of his face was open, get a plate full of buttered noodles and sit in front of the TV set and watch someone who was worse off than I was." It's hard to tell if she's kidding or not, but it's that very ambiguity -- is this funny? is this sad? -- that brings it breathtakingly close to the truth.

Although Bombeck also wrote eloquently on the joys of motherhood, she defended working moms and frequently wrote about the fact that when the kids head off to school -- if not sooner -- it's time to start having a life. "My excuse for everything just got on that bus," she writes of a woman's anxiety when a child starts school. "My excuse for not dieting, not getting a full-time job, not cleaning house, not re-upholstering the furniture, not going back to school, not having order in my life, not cleaning the oven."

Kids as an excuse not to face the world? That's just one of the many complicated things children can turn out to be, and Bombeck wrote about them all. Reading Bombeck in tandem with Winik points up what is missing from the latter. Winik is warm, appealing and personal; Bombeck was cool, universal and wickedly funny. For all her wild youth, Winik comes off as literal-minded, earnest and slightly square; Bombeck was always just a little badder than you'd expect. The issue in the end is not that Marion Winik is too edgy to wear Erma Bombeck's crown. She isn't edgy enough.
SALON | April 17, 1998

Jennifer Reese writes frequently for Salon.