Postcard from the Edge

For one mother, navigating the school system is almost too much.

MOTHER ON FIRE

A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting!

By Sandra Tsing Loh

Crown. 298 pp. $23

In 2004, Sandra Tsing Loh became something of a free-speech cause celebre when she was fired by a Santa Monica-based NPR station because of an obscenity in her on-air commentary. And the incident garnered something more coveted than fame: a spot for her daughter in an exclusive Los Angeles-area kindergarten. But there was a catch: the school's annual tuition, a whopping $22,500. "My Grrrrl power-like battle cry," Loh writes, "devolved to the far less glamorous, 'I am a Celebrity Mom . . . who needs financial aid.' "

This is one of the myriad frustrations Loh recounts in her new memoir, Mother on Fire, a droll rant about her experience navigating the maze of school options for her 4-year-old daughter. The book, based on her one-woman show of the same title, made me laugh out loud more than once. Particularly good is Loh's rendition of conversations with yuppie parents whining about the difficulty of finding kindergartens in L.A. worthy of their allegedly gifted children: "It's very HARD for gifted children!" she quotes one mother saying.

Loh's greatest strengths are these snippets of dialogue and her blunt, funny characterizations of both her own foibles and those of the many other mothers she encounters. She's also witty in characterizing those close to her, including her 85-year-old Chinese father, whom she describes with loving irreverence:

"In addition to the grocery bags on his back, my father is carrying his customary old wrinkled white plastic UCLA bag of what appear to be toiletries. He attaches it to himself by means of a yellow-and-blue bungee cord he found on the beach. Straining forward with the bungee cord around his neck, he looks like Jack LaLanne pulling a tugboat, except that the UCLA bag he is carrying is no larger than the size of a small airline pillow and is about as heavy as a bag filled with Kleenex. Which it may well be. My father hates to waste paper by blowing his nose into a tissue just once."

Loh, who has written four previous books, including A Year in Van Nuys and If You Lived Here, You'd be Home by Now, is not 100-percent politically correct, and she doesn't pull punches. ("Oh my GOD! . . . We are SUCH IMMIGRANTS!!!" she writes of an incident involving her father and the crumpled dollar bills he carries in that grocery bag.) She uses capital letters and exclamation points liberally, a tic that at first struck me as high-schoolish but that came to acquire the comforting rhythm of an ironic code.

The memoir lags every now and then in places where Loh presents herself delivering lengthy diatribes to other people she meets -- in full and complex phrases that could never fall trippingly off the tongue in unpremeditated fashion -- on subjects such as the evils of the baby boom generation. "You boomers have presided over the greatest decline, the greatest return to public-school segregation in U.S. history. Consumers rather than citizens -- it is entirely your doing!" she orates to her shrink.

While she's not afraid to touch on issues of class and race in a way that's both humorous and trenchant, Loh sidesteps the questions that anyone with an even moderately feminist perspective on contemporary parenting should raise. The matter of mother-father divisions of labor, for example, is a source of resentment and turmoil for the 30- and 40-something mothers I know. Its absence here is an odd omission. Loh's musician husband, the affable but somewhat-incompetent-at-parental-tasks Mike, disappears for months on tour in the middle of the narrative -- as musicians must, certainly -- but Loh mentions his absenteeism during the all-consuming school search only in passing.

And there's a certain unfortunate NPR-ness -- an assurance that "It's all OK, everything's nice and homey in the end" -- that attends Loh's ultimate epiphany about public schools, where her daughter ends up: that these schools, held up by women who love their children, are the places to be. Beholding public-school-like diversity around the city, Loh writes with apparent earnestness: "There is grace all around me. The universe hums -- the invisible web." This is a comedian best served hot, not hokey.

But in the end, funny trumps all, and Mother on Fire offers much to entertain the many mothers among us. ·

Lydia Millet is the author of six novels, including, most recently, "How the Dead Dream."