"What, the rules have changed?"

"Yes," Dr. D said.

Of course they had. The rules of parenthood are always changing.

From Deborah Copaken Kogan, the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Shutterbabe, comes an edgy, insightful, and very funny memoir about the harrowing world of modern parenting.

Kogan writes situation comedy in the same way that David Sedaris and Spalding Gray have written it--wry, acutely observed, and often hilarious true tales in which the narrator is as culpable as any character. In these eleven pieces, Kogan and her husband are almost always broke - while raising three children in New York City, one of the most expensive and competitive (beware of the PTA president!) cities in the world.

In one episode, exhausted from a particularly difficult childbirth, Kogan finds herself sharing a hospital room with a blaringly foul-mouthed, TV-addicted teen mother and her partying posse. In another piece, Kogan requires an emergency appendectomy during the week her babysitter is on vacation and the rest of her family is down with the flu. In the book's capper essay, she drives twelve hours with a monstrously tantruming toddler in a desperate effort to catch a glimpse of her oldest child in his summer-camp play.

In her twenties, Kogan risked her life to work as a war photographer; in her thirties, she puts her bank balance and her sanity in jeopardy to raise three children in Manhattan. But as pieces of writing, her personal trials make for fresh, indelible reading.