A Few Good Books: October - Alec Baldwin Talks About Fatherhood 

I came across this really great book review in last week's NY Times of A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce by Alec Baldwin with Mark Tabb.  It gave me the idea for "A Few Good Books," in which every month I'll do a blog about a different book dealing with divorce.  I've already been seeking out books for November. 

For those of you living under a rock who don't know who Alec Baldwin is, allow me to explain.  Starring in hit movies like The Shadow, and Beetlejuice, appearing in hilarious skits on Saturday Night Live, and now as network fatcat Jack Donaghy on the hilarious Tina Fey sitcom 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin has had a pretty good ride.  But after a tumultuous divorce from actress ex-wife Kim Basinger and an angry voice-mail he left to their daughter which was leaked to the press earlier this year, Baldwin was ready to call it quits.  He talked about leaving the set of 30 Rock to pursue better endeavors, namely helping fathers who often get the short end of the stick during divorce proceedings.  But - thankfully - he didn't leave 30 Rock (if you haven't seen the show, watch it; it's HILARIOUS), but managed to fuel his angst into a bestselling book.

Alex Kuczynski's Times review of Baldwin's book was barely favorable, while her review of Baldwin-the-actor was quite favorable.  Though she does sum up the book in a small succinct sentence, calling it "a treatise on how the family law system in America is broken, and why it should be changed."  Baldwin brings up Parental Alienation Syndrome (P.A.S.), a very real "disease" in today's world where custody battles almost always end with custody being granted to the mother, leaving many fathers out in the proverbial cold, victims of angry ex-wives who use their children as pawns, and their thieving hungry lawyers (as Baldwins describes them) not for justice, but for punishment.

As a celebrity, your divorce - hell under normal non-celebrity circumstances - is even more hellish, right smack dab in the middle of the ever-growing limelight.  Kuczynski mires her negative comments of Baldwin's book amidst left-handed compliments.  She writes, "Baldwin wants us to believe that P.A.S. is a legitimate syndrome, yet he goes to curious lengths to show us that it may not be a sound diagnosis."  She calls the "transcript format" Baldwin uses at the end of his book "ponderous, self-serious and rigid."  She ends her review with the half-critical statement, "For all its faults, its creakinesses and almost codger-like crankiness, its occasionally sludgy prose, this book has a point. Divorce is hell. Lawyers are vultures. Children get lost. Baldwin bravely set out to illuminate and change the way divorce is conducted in this country; he also, wittingly or not, offers a candid, unhappy portrait of a marriage gone desperately sour."

I'd blame Mark Tabb for any rigidity in transcription or sludginess of prose, no?  Baldwin was just the voice behind the words.  That's what actors who aren't versed in authorship do; they hire a professional writer to tell their tale better than they could themselves.  I think Kuczynski loses Baldwin's goals behind her perceived clunkiness of the text.  Rarely do we ever hear the side of the father.  If one were to count the genders of people on this website, I'd bet anything the majority are women.  It's often the women who speak out about their pain, their hurt; it's the women who usually get custody of the children.  It isn't often we get such an insightful birdseye view of what it feels like to be a dad left in the dust.  I'd recommend this book to mothers and fathers of divorce, and childless divorcees alike.  You all share one common bond: you all meant well going into your marriages, and you came out of it learning that divorce is hell.  And, as they say, hell is paved with good intentions.

Read the article in full: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/books/review/Kuczynski-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin