Kyran Pittman

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."… (més)

I received an advanced reader copy of this book from the publisher way, way back in April. It has been at the top of my TBR pile since I received it, but other books kept pushing it down in the stacks. I finally got around to reading it this week.

And I’m happy I did. Planting Dandelions is a lovely collection of essays about marriage and families written by a woman who really never expected to find either in her life and who was totally amazed to discover how much marriage and family delighted her. Author Pittman doesn’t skim over the difficult days (which are pretty much every day when you are raising kids and maintaining a marriage) but her little essays are hilarious and clever and consoling to those of us who are in or have been in her shoes.… (més)