Adam Mansbach has certainly struck a chord with moms and dads everywhere with its PG-13, for-parents-eyes-only bedtime story book Go the F**k to Sleep, which, as its expletive-deleted title suggests, urges children to call it a day with a generous salting of f-bombs throughout.
Millions of parents have read the story online already through a PDF version that went viral last month, and shortly after it was released on June 14, it shot to the top of Amazon.com’s “parenting and families” bestseller category. And now those of us who are too lazy to read it can listen to Samuel L. Jackson read it aloud at Audible.com. According to the Associated Press, two days after the audio version had been released, it had been downloaded 160,000 times.
That’s a lot of not-suitable-for-work listening going on by a lot of bleary-eyed moms and dads who wish their kids would do just as the title suggests. Of course, we parents aren’t actually supposed to read this book to our kids—we all know that if we did, we’d be getting a call from school the next day to come pick up our little foul-mouthed parrots.
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The book is definitely funny, especially when Jackson reads the story (we all know what his acting chops did for those mother bleeping snakes on the mother bleeping plane, right?). But for me, the book isn’t laugh-out-loud funny because my kids are really good sleepers, so it’s not something I can totally relate to—and surely I’ve just set myself up for a thousand sleepless nights due to the all-powerful parental jinx of saying things are going well in a particular corner of parenthood only to have them instantly go south.
Even if I can’t personally relate to Mansbach’s book, I’m all for anything that finds humor in the hard parts of parenting, because it's so much better to laugh out loud while you pull your hair out than it is to scream.
