Planting Dandelions: 04/04/13

Planting Dandelions by Kyran Pittman is a memoir in the form of a collection of essays. The book began its life as a blog — as so many memoirs these days seem to. The author is a regular contributor to Good Housekeeping.

I put those details forward because neither fact had any influence in me choosing this book — and perhaps might have some bearing on my overall reaction to it. I haven't read the author's blog (originally "Notes to Self" and later "Planting Dandelions") and the last time I read Good Housekeeping I was a teen and still living at home (in other words, it's been a long time).

What brought me to this book then was the title and the cover — a bouquet of dandelions. See my kids were going through a phase of actually planting dandelions in our balcony garden when I saw this book at the library.

The memoir / essays tell about Pittman's first marriage and the husband she left in Canada, and her move to Arkansas. There she met a new man, remarried and had three sons. Each new child ads a new level of complexity to her life.

So the gist of the book is: marriage is hard, being an adult is hard, Arkansas is really different from Canada, and being a parent is hard (but rewarding). Why yes — adulthood and parenthood is hard but that doesn't automatically make a book "relatable."

Three stars

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