"Weird?"
In a book review for this newspaper early last year, Warner wrote what must be among the most startling first paragraphs ever. She doesn't explain it, or come back to it in the piece.
"My father, a psychologist, spent the last three decades of his life writing what he called his Book of Love. . . . When he died, in 1995, and I sorted through his papers . . . I found a couple of old manuscripts that had been rejected by publishers back in the 1970s. And beyond that, nothing but notes -- boxes and boxes and file drawers and desk drawers and closets and bookshelves and kitchen cabinets filled with notes. All expressing his passionate and prodigious hatred. Largely of me."
Judith Warner signs copies of her book at Washington's private Sheridan School. Many of the women she interviewed live in Washington's upscale neighborhoods.
(Photos Michael Robinson-chavez -- The Washington Post)
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Now she says the discovery of her father's notes came as a relief, because it validated a reality she had suspected all her life. Until she resolved it, she couldn't have children, because family life seemed so fraught and closely associated with "unhappiness."
Since then she's recovered earlier, happier memories of her father from before she was 7, before he went "crazy" and their relationship soured. Writing it down, she says, let her control it even more.
Warner conceived of "Perfect Madness" when she came back from France, where her first child was born. There she felt supported, with good, affordable child care, a pediatrician who answered his phone, mothers who didn't think twice about looking good and going out to dinner with their husbands. She came to Washington and found mothers down in the basement manically labeling bins of toys. For a few years she absorbed their mania, living a life of "quiet panic." Writing the book has given her some distance from the neurotic mothering culture, but not a lot. One lesson of the new Warner age is that awareness doesn't save you. In her book, at the Sheridan School, the same character recurs -- a woman who is highly aware, even critical or mocking of the craziness around her, and yet unable to resist -- something like the drug addict who can faithfully recite the 12 steps but still can't kick the habit.
Her kids are older and she's more used to her life as a Washington mother. "I'm a lot cooler now than I was," she says. "But there are still all kinds of things to obsess on."
Outside the Sheridan gym, Warner waits to give her talk. This has been the "day from hell," she says -- nursing a migraine while doing her taxes by phone -- so this speech is the easy part. Inside is a room full of 200 people who read Warner's Newsweek piece, or parts of her book, and in many cases were moved to tears, from painful recognition, or rage. They trade stories about staying up until 4 a.m. to finish it, buying it for 10 of their friends.
Most had to arrange special baby-sitting to come but this was urgent, says Brenda Kittay, a mother of two who showed up a half-hour early. She could have written the book herself, she says, it was so familiar.
"What I want to know now is, does she have the solution? Does she really have an answer? I'm just looking for a little guidance here."
Warner is a perfect speaker for this crowd, conveying a mix of tremulousness and authority. As always her diagnosis is much richer than any solution. Before moving to Washington, she says, she didn't know that not having an easel in her house was the equivalent of child neglect. That she would find herself trying to bake the perfect cookie, hunting down the last gram of trans fat, indulging in all the baroque ways we find to "make ourselves miserable" in the endless quest for perfection.
After the talk the women move to another room for book signing and cookies and punch. Many lean over to tell Warner intimate things, about schools, husbands, vague feelings of alienation. Warner is not the nurturing type, but she listens and often responds with her wide smile.
Patty Martin is here overseeing the setup, making up a fresh to-do list in her head: Who will wash out the coffee urns, who will take home all these tulips?
Her daughter's teacher is here and gently reminded her that in all the frenzy over the book talk, Martin forgot to show up for lunch duty today. "I can never show my face in the school again," says Martin, mostly joking but sort of not.
"See. I'm not the perfect mom," she says, and then rushes off into the kitchen.
