In these sharp and humorous essays, columnist Patricia Pearson takes us on a hilarious tour of our twenty-first-century obsessions and distractions. Pearson plumbs every facet of modern life, marriage, and motherhood, and her wry brand of wisdom is a refreshing and long-awaited release from our confusing and often contradictory world. Patricia Pearson is a frequent contributor to USA Today and the author of the novel Playing House. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Observer, the Guardian, and Redbook, among other publications, and she won the Arthur Ellis Award in 1997 for best nonfiction crime book, When She Was Bad. She recently moved from Toronto to the boreal forest outside Montreal with her husband and two children. "Pearson's writing is side-splittingly funny...but amid the debris of the near-disasters perpetrated by her children, there's a tender mother hanging on to her identity at all costs."-Albany Times Union "Patricia Pearson holds little...

How curious can a five-year-old really be? Frannie and Calvin are back, and even more baffled, in this hilarious and heartwarming sequel to Patricia Pearson’s critically acclaimed comic novel, Playing House.Frannie Mackenzie thought she finally had her life on track. Even though she backed into love and parenthood — getting pregnant before she even knew how to spell her lover Calvin’s last name (P-U-D-D-I-E) — the birth of baby Lester seemed to put everything in the right order at last. Ha! When her mother-in-law, Bernice, takes theatrically to her death bed and Calvin can’t deal, Frannie has to step up to the next big challenge: what to make of mortality when you’re pretty sure there’s no afterlife. And Lester, at five, knows just how to test his mother’s verbal and spiritual limits. Spotting a crucifix in a local church, Lester inquires, “What happened to that guy?”There’s certainly no lack of absolutists in Frannie’s life: an atheist scientist bent on disproving God, a near-death experiencer, a suburban shaman, and the whole neo-con coterie of magazine editors at The Moral Volcano who pay her salary. But when it comes down to surveying the landscape of their own beliefs, Frannie and Calvin find that a dying woman and a growing child offer the most lasting lessons on life and faith.From the Hardcover edition.

In this provocative book, award-winning journalist Patricia Pearson argues that our culture is in denial of women's innate capacity for aggression. We don't believe that women batter their husbands or abuse the majority of children in North America. We ignore the 200 percent increase in crime by women in a period when most crime statistics are dropping. Pearson weaves the stories of women such as Karla Homolka and Mary Beth Tinning (who smothered eight of her children) with the results of criminologists and psychiatrists to expose the myth of female innocence.From the Trade Paperback edition.