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New York Times bestseller “You Have To F**king Eat” is Adam Mansbach’s sequel to another NYT bestseller “Go The F**k To Sleep” launched a few years ago at P. J. Clark’s. “I never intended it to be a series and I was pretty hesitant to do a sequel for the first few years, but it just sort of belatedly dawned on me that eating is the other great parental frustration and it’s kind of on the par with sleeping,” Mansbach told Hollywood on the Potomac.
“It’s just as frustrating,” he emphasized, “plus you kind of see the heart of the core of who you are as a parent because it’s like sleeping is a very primal kind of thing, right? Eating and sleeping are the two things that grasp most of this incredible happiness; so, the notion that you can’t convince your kid that putting stuff into her body is a good idea, kind of makes you wonder who the hell you are and who the hell your kid is, you know?”
We were curious as to whether the profanity in both the titles and throughout the books hampered sales: “You know, I don’t think that the profanity hurt us too much in the long run. I’m still kind of amazed at the life that that book continues to have. People are still having babies and they are still going to baby showers and they’re still buying the book. It’s been almost four years now and we’re still going pretty strong,” he replied.
“You know, I think my experience with “Go The F**k To Sleep” was that the audience ended up being shockingly wider than I ever would’ve imagined it would be. Certainly, it’s a lot of young parents, but we also sell a ton of books to grandparents because of the audio books and stuff like people who don’t yet have kids. I had a ton of high school kids who have written me and are like, ‘This is the best book, I love this book, I love the audio book.’ So I think it’s kind of anybody who’s ever interacted in any way with a child that’s our audience.”
“Okay, I’m your little infant sitting in front of you,” we asked Adam to visualize, “and you’re about to spoon something into my face. I’m going to throw it on the floor or back at you. How do you rectify that situation?”
“Well, my kid is six now,” he answered, “so I’m not really in that situation anymore. The only tactics that I’ve ever had any success with were mostly about distracting her from the food she doesn’t think she likes and engaging her in a conversation about something else so that she forgets that she doesn’t want to eat and she kind of like goes ahead and eats it. But in the case of my daughter, most of the time, it’s not that she actually doesn’t like the food, it’s that she’s making a knee-jerk decision that at this particular moment, she has stopped liking it. So I just have to get her to forget that she made that decision. Luckily, we all pretty much end up sorting out most of our food anxieties. In this country we do have an epidemic of obesity, so maybe we’re not doing as well as we think we do, but the problem in this country for adults certainly does not seem to be ‘not eating’ it seems to be eating too much and not knowing the difference between healthy food and garbage.”
Both books are available in audio so we asked about that. What is the process? “Well, the audio book is produced by a company called audible.com, so it’s their job to find the reader. We worked with them in terms of talking about who we wanted but then it’s ultimately up to them to strike the deal with them. The first time around, we were lucky enough to have Sam Jackson do the audio and he’s kind of an amazing guy. It became sort of a weird thing where different people would also record the audio. Werner Herzog did a version and Jenna Elfman made a music video and Judah Friedlander read it and LeVar Burton read it only a few weeks ago. So when I did this book, I knew that there were not too many people who I felt could be on that level and Bryan Cranston was the one who, from very early on, in my mind was the best choice. I knew he would kill it, he’s an incredible actor, and we were lucky enough to get him. He’s the voice of “You Have to F**king Eat” and he does a pretty amazing job. … because of the character he plays on Breaking Bad who was one of the most compelling heroes, anti-heroes, villains in the history of television. Also, Cranston just has an amazing voice and reads with amazing depth and nuance. There are actually some moments in Breaking Bad where the Walter White character reads. There’s an episode that actually, I believe, begins with him reading a Whitman poem in voice-over and it’s one of the most compelling and darkly sinister readings I’ve ever heard and that kind of sealed the deal for me and made me feel like he would kill it.”
Audio clip by Bryan Cranston:
“Go the F**k to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, it captures the familiar — and unspoken — tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. Beautiful, subversive, and pants-wettingly funny, Go the F**k to Sleep is a book for parents new, old, and expectant.” Amazon
As much as we are endeared to Samuel L. Jackson’s version, we are posting our own read by friend Courtney Cohen produced by Hollywood on the Potomac:
