Don't Wait Up: Confessions of a Stay-at-Work Mom

by Liz Astrof

Overview

For fans of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and I Heart My Little A-Holes comes a candid and hilarious collection of essays on motherhood from the award-winning television comedy writer and producer of 2 Broke Girls and The King of Queens, who swears she loves her kids—when she’s not hiding from them.

Some women feel that motherhood is a calling and their purpose on earth. They somehow manage to make pregnancy look effortless, bring out the beauty in a screaming child, and keep the back seat of their cars as spotless as their kitchens.

And then there’s women like Liz Astrof. Who originally had children because “everyone else was.”

In this blunt and side-splittingly funny book of essays, Liz Astrof embraces the realities of motherhood (and womanhood) that no one ever talks about: like needing to hide from your kids in your closet, your car, or a yoga class on the other side of town, letting them eat candy for dinner because you just can't deal, to the sheer terror of failing them or at the very least losing them in a mall. And sometimes, many times, wondering if the whole parenting thing wasn’t for you.

In vivid and relatable prose, she discusses her love for her career, how she’s managed to overcome some of her own dysfunctional childhood, and the ups and downs of raising the little demons she calls her own...from the office.

Soul-baring, entertaining, and insightful, Don't Wait Up is an abashedly honest look at parenting and relationships for moms who realize that motherhood doesn’t have to be your entire life—just an amazing part of it—that you would definitely most likely do all over again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982106959
Publisher:	Gallery Books
Publication date:	07/30/2019
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Liz Astrof is an award-winning executive producer and one of the most successful sitcom writers in television today. She created Fox’s Pivoting and has worked on The King of Queens, Raising Hope, 2 Broke Girls, and many more. While she can rarely be seen at her kids’ school, Liz is often seen driving by. She lives in California with her family, two dogs, a gecko, and at least three turtles.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Stay-at-Work Mom ix

Guilt Trip 1

Rules of Estrangement 27

No More Monsters 49

The Stain 73

The Year of the Turtle 93

Happy New Year 111

Out of the Basement, Into the Fire 129

The Kids in the Orange Shirts 143

Little Royalty 155

The Typhoid Mary of Playa Blanca 169

Water Is for Writers 189

It's Not Brain Surgery 205

Are You There, God …? It's Me Jeff's Sister 225

Tim Allen Tried to Kill Me 243

The Love Bracelet 261

I've Got This 279

Epilogue: One Flying Leap 289

Acknowledgments 299

Editorial Reviews

05/13/2019

Astrof, a sitcom writer and producer, offers a hilarious and heartfelt essay collection about, among other topics, her life as a Los Angeles “stay-at-work” mother with a demanding schedule and a fear so great of the bedtime hour that she sometimes lingers in her car until her husband has put their two children to sleep. In the sidesplitting opening essay, Astrof describes taking her seven- and nine-year-olds to a water park one weekend, while having no intention of going in the water herself. Readers will laugh out loud as she relents and dons a child’s extra-extra-large bathing suit—albeit backwards. There are heartbreaking pieces as well—one describes the frightening few weeks when, after her parents’ divorce, her unstable mother absconded with six-year-old Astrof (and, almost equally painfully, declined to abduct her brother). Nor was life with Astrof’s father easy, as he sent her to Camp Shane (aka “Camp Shame”) to lose weight. Though Astrof’s collection is often trenchant in its look at her own difficult childhood, it is also permeated with a sense of love for her kids, and is sure to resonate deeply with other parents. Kristyn Keene, ICM. (July)

Publishers Weekly

[Astrof’s] love for her family shines through as she offers a brutally honest look at motherhood, marriage and work, rarely losing her sense of humor even while totally exasperated. . . [She] is gorgeously shameless, honest and funny, and manages to be insightful and poignant at the same time.

The New York Post

"Astrof is like the hilarious, did-she-really-just-say-that friend you would kill to have at school pickup—the one that makes you explode in gleeful, scandalized laughter. She goes there—and the parenting genre is never going to be the same."

Jancee Dunn

"No one makes me laugh harder than Liz Astrof. This book is the best combination of her biting humor, self-deprecating wit, and so so so much heart. It had me in tears from page one. This is a must-read memoir for anyone who has a mother or is a mother or knows a mother. Even if you can spell ‘mother.’"

Emmy Award-nominated actress and comedian Molly Shannon

So funny, so relatable, just... genius.”

Emmy Award-winning actress and television host Sara Gilbert

"An exceptionally funny and charismatic voice... Her [Liz Astrof's] candid essays in Don't Wait Up address life's ordeals with acerbic wit, but never reduce her experiences to a laugh track... Written with a sharp pen and an open heart, Astrof's work is heartbreakingly poignant and funny as hell."

Shelf Awareness

Refreshingly honest and hilarious! Astrof says out loud what so many parents are afraid to admit."

Karen Alpert

"Don’t Wait Up is a funny, fascinating memoir of mothering that will definitely keep readers up way past their bedtime, laughing and sometimes crying page after page.

BookPage

Successful comedy writer and television producer Astrof has put together a forthright, laugh-out-loud collection of essays that lets you in on a little of what makes her shows like 2 Broke Girls or The King of Queens so much fun. . . Hilarious and, of course, as well written as any good sitcom episode, Don't Wait Up is a great read for all the moms who also aren't quite sure what to make of motherhood, and for anyone else who likes a laugh.”

Booklist

"I found this book utterly disturbing. Not because of Liz's unique take on motherhood, a self-proclaimed Stay-at-Work Mom, but because in a million years I will never write anything this funny. And that is unacceptable."

Emmy Award-winning actor Jack Burditt

"Liz Astrof is wickedly funny, which is an overused term, but I feel should be solely reserved for Liz. She lets you into her life and doesn't try to sugarcoat it. It's unflinchingly honest and so effortlessly hilarious. I can't tell if Liz is insane or not, which, I swear, is a compliment."

Justin Halpern

Raw, bold, heartbreaking, ridiculously funny, and wildly inappropriate—I would expect nothing less from Liz Astrof. As someone who's seen the inside of her diaper bag—I can tell you, the stories are all true.

Actress Whitney Cummings

Successful comedy writer and television producer Astrof has put together a forthright, laugh-out-loud collection of essays that lets you in on a little of what makes her shows like 2 Broke Girls or The King of Queens so much fun. . . Hilarious and, of course, as well written as any good sitcom episode, Don't Wait Up is a great read for all the moms who also aren't quite sure what to make of motherhood, and for anyone else who likes a laugh.

Booklist

"I found this book utterly disturbing. Not because of Liz's unique take on motherhood, a self-proclaimed Stay-at-Work Mom, but because in a million years I will never write anything this funny. And that is unacceptable."

Jack Burditt

2019-04-14
A producer and comedy writer for 2 Broke Girls and The King of Queens, among other programs, brings her humor to the homefront with these essays about her childhood and raising her own children.

Given Astrof's extensive background in comedy, readers will expect humor throughout, and the author delivers with one punchline after another. The author clearly loves her children, but she prefers to leave the details of raising them to her husband. She shares a wide, wacky variety of stories: how she avoids returning home until she knows her kids are safely tucked in bed, how she handled a weekend at Great Wolf Lodge, an indoor water park where signs warned swimmers not to enter the pool with "active" diarrhea ("I could only speculate as to what ‘active' meant to the legal team…but mostly, I was grateful that I wouldn't have to so much as dip a toe in that shit river"), how she reacted when her stash of candy dissolved while on vacation in Mexico; why she is convinced she'll be murdered while on a work-related weekend with fellow writers; why a "fun" trip to the mall with her kids is anything but; and how an idyllic vacation in Hawaii turned into a fiasco thanks to one errant text message. Underneath the comedy, however, are details about the author's difficult childhood living with verbally abusive parents who fought over her custody. She also grew up with weight and self-esteem issues and still has trouble with both concerns as an adult. The juxtaposition between the absurdity and the reality of Astrof's life creates a mostly effective balance, which pushes this book beyond the slapstick visible at the surface and into a more reflective realm.

Droll wit and profundity swirl together in a revealing memoir from a successful comedy writer.

Kirkus Reviews