I was sick of blokey books by dads – could mothers’ memoirs make me a better father?

All the parenting manuals I'd read were jokey and superficial. Then I turned to Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy ...

What does a book look like that is going to change your life? How do the pages feel? How does it smell? Surely not like the parenting books I started reading more than two years ago, in the spring of 2018, when I was on parental leave, the weather was gorgeous and my marriage was beginning to crumble. And yet these were books that would change my life. Only not in the way I anticipated.

If it seems late to start reading up on how best to be a father after your child is born, then I'd better not mention I have one more daughter, who was then almost nine. I had some catching up to do then; 10 years of it, to be exact. I approached the task with the same degree of self-confidence as I might have if buying a dishwasher, blindly searching the web for keywords: father, dad, fatherhood. I chanced on a collection of personal essays by the novelist Michael Chabon, called Pops, which had just come out to agreeable reviews. I swallowed the book in one gulp, and was not disappointed. There were snippets I could easily relate to, such as when Chabon points out that for a father to receive praise, he rarely has to do more than show up with a baby in a grocery shop queue. The moment I put down the book, I found out he had written one more, called Manhood for Amateurs. I downed that one, too, and, like a lonely drunk in a bar, I deposited my credit card and kept ordering.