How I Became the Assh*le Mom by Kara Kinney Cartwright

May 10, 2020 | By Kara Kinney Cartwright | Reply More

I recently published book for teenage boys entitled, “Just Don’t Be An Assh*le: A Surprisingly Necessary Guide to Being a Good Guy.” I’m not saying I’m Miss Manners, but if we’d ever met at a party, and you had asked yourself afterward: Which of these people is most likely to write a book with a swear in the title? I am quite confident you wouldn’t pick me. But it did happen, through a series of very fortunate events.

In the 2010s, I began writing haiku on social media. Yes, haiku. At first, Suburban Haiku was a short-attention-span creative outlet, but it fast became a way of connecting with other moms at home with their littles during a time when I was feeling isolated and bored. (Sorry, kids, I love you, but Legos were just not my thing.)

The wonderful thing about writing for a niche audience (in my case, smart, funny, moms who appreciate a poem and can take a joke—many of whom turned out to be writers themselves) is that as time goes on, your audience can become your inspiration, your cheerleaders, and your friends.

Case in point: On a day when I was feeling inexplicably bold, I asked a social media acquaintance for advice on how to send my self-published Suburban Haiku prototype to publishers. To my utter shock, Suzanne Weber, author of To What Miserable Wretches Have I Been Born?: Revenge Poetry For Babies And Toddlers, messaged me back that she had called her literary agency and Monika Verma of Levine Greenberg (now Levine Greenberg Rostan) would be happy to talk with me.

Reader, I almost fainted. I’m almost fainting again right now, just thinking about how kind that was.

To my continuing-and-still-utter shock, Monika patiently and generously guided me through several drafts and managed to sell Suburban Haiku.

To promote the book, I began writing parenting humor and pitching it to online publications, again thanks to female friends who mentored me and boosted me into new opportunities.

Hoping to thank them in person, I attended a couple of wonderful conferences for women writers, where I met my writing buddy Julianna Miner, who later became the author of Raising a Screen-Smart Kid: Embrace the Good and Avoid the Bad in the Digital Age. My online/in person writer friends, too many to mention here, have racked up all manner of impressive writing, publishing, media, artistic, advocacy, and humanitarian achievements. I’m proud of the so-called “mom bloggers” I came up with. We all benefit every day from their accomplishments.

By the time I started thinking about publishing another book, it was 2016 and I was detecting a shift in culture that I wanted to address in some way. With Julie’s help and encouragement, I pitched Monika two book ideas, both of which we collaborated on and proposed, but neither of which ultimately sold.

One was an illustrated book—a series of before and after cartoons for middle aged moms, comparing childhood’s great expectations with our current disappointing realities. The second, Have a Nice Life!, was a survival guide for nice people facing an increasingly rude world, consisting of advice on how to be aggressively, vengefully nice. The feedback from publishers centered on the challenge of finding a receptive audience for aspirational and sweet, but also uncomfortably blunt humor. (I see now that I was going through some stuff and thank Monika for sticking with me.)

By this time, my sons were in college and high school, and I was offered a full-time position in legal publishing, the career I’d put on pause to raise them. After two unsuccessful book proposals, it seemed like the right time to stop writing jokes and start editing treatises. So that’s what I did.

More than a year later, I heard from Monika again. She’d met with Matthew Benjamin, an editor now at Rodale Books. He was interested in working with a mom who had frontline knowledge of teenage minds for a book entitled, Just Don’t Be an Asshole. He envisioned a blunt and humorous book, with real advice on how to be decent and kind. She thought I might be the perfect fit.

I was paralyzed.

I had a full-time job. My commute was over an hour each way. My sons were six months away from graduating high school and college. Panicked, I reached out to Julie, who said, and I quote:

YOU HAVE TO WRITE THIS BOOK I WILL DO ANYTHING TO HELP YOU WHAT DO YOU NEED ME TO DO???? Because this is a book only you can write and it’s so obvious to me that I’m now shocked we didn’t think of pitching this a long time ago.

She was right. The audience for this book was my audience, my boys. Right as I was delivering a series of urgent (OK, sometimes desperate), awkward, funny lectures to my boys in the hope of preparing them to face the world, here was an opportunity to write it all down for them, and maybe help other people’s sons be a little braver and kinder, too. The timing, though terrifying, couldn’t have been more perfect.

So now I’m the Asshole Mom, the mom who calls boys out on their teenagery behavior and asks them to do better. And I’m more than good with it, because (1) I say it with love for all of our boys, every single time, and (2) Penguin Random House lured me into an audiobook recording studio, where I had to listen to the sound of my own voice saying “asshole” 300 times. I’m immune now.

***

Kara Kinney Cartwright is the author of Just Don’t Be an Asshole: A Surprisingly Necessary Guide to Being a Good Guy. She always says please, thank you, and excuse me—even on the subway. She married a total good guy and, through relentless lecturing, threatening, teasing, cash bribing, and tricking, they have raised two sons who are not assh*les, for the most part. If you happen to know her in person, her book is not about you, probably. She has written for HuffPost, Scary Mommy, Babble, Grown and Flown, and more. She lives near Washington, DC, and works as a law book editor.

Facebook: dbakarakc

Twitter: dbakarakc

Just Don’t Be an Assh*le: A Surprisingly Necessary Guide to Being a Good Guy

This is the tough love that boys need to hear today: a candid and whipsmart guide to being a good guy in a world full of assh*les.

In this frank, funny, and necessary guidebook, Kara Kinney Cartwright, a mom who has raised two teenage boys, compiles all the unwritten rules of being a good guy. As it turns out, everyone needs to learn one major lesson to safely avoid assh*le territory: other people are also humans. (Whoa, right?)

Just Don’t Be an Assh*le contains everything young men need to know to have positive interactions, make the best decisions, and recognize when they’re being jerks. Things like,

Just don’t be an assh*le: