My daughter Allie is a member of a book group consisting of moms with babies. They call themselves the Dead Tired Society and they meet whenever several conditions can be met: (1) they have all read the same book, or nearly all of them, at least; (2) they can agree on a day when a majority of them don’t have anything else they MUST DO; and (3) their babies are in relatively decent health, or at least good enough so that they won’t be the one blamed when two days later, the entire group is throwing up.

I think they’ve been together nearly a year, and they’re up to three books. My hat is off to them. It’s been a bad year for babies and flu.

Last week they invited me to come and talk to them about my book, What Comes After Crazy, which was the novel that took me 17 years to write. (I wrote it while I, too, was raising kids, and thus had to wait for conditions to be perfect). I told them I LOVE going and talking to book groups.

“Wellll…” said the hostess, whose name is Sam. She’s the mother of Esme, who has just turned 1. “There may be more crying at this group than you’re used to at most book groups you talk to…”

I said I was familiar with crying at book groups. Usually somebody has to go and get tissues.

But then there wasn’t any after all. We all sat in Sam’s wonderful Brooklyn apartment, while babies climbed over us, poked fingers in our eyes, played with rattles and balls, tried to climb over partitions so they could get to Sam’s valuable computer system (how is it that all babies can sense immediately where computers are located and just what button to push to dismantle them?) A very energetic toddler named Zane–admired by the others for his ability to actually WALK–went down the hall to the nursery and managed, with great difficulty, to come out with the entire floor covering for the nursery, a rubber puzzle mat consisting of the ABC’s, I believe. This was a very time-consuming project for him, but he was definite that it had to be done, and all the other babies were impressed.

It was lots of fun sitting on the floor, passing babies around. Young moms have such an incredible ability to do such things as breastfeed, wipe noses, change diapers, search out hidden pacifiers, tie shoes, soothe tears, and save a baby from leaping off a couch–all at the same time and ALL WHILE CARRYING ON AN ADULT CONVERSATION.  They don’t even break a sweat doing it. It’s always a pleasure to watch them. I think women in their twenties and thirties could run the world without any trouble at all, even on the limited sleep most of them get.

Because the book is about a woman raised by a mostly crazy, fortune-telling, narcissistic mom, book groups always love (and I love) to talk about our own moms, for good and for ill, and what they forced us to cope with and how we managed to grow up. Everybody always wants to know whether the book was really about my mother.

“Sort of,” I say. My mother wasn’t a fortune-teller, and we never lived in a trailer, and she didn’t get married seven times…but let’s just say there are certain qualities that she shared with Madame Lucille. When my publisher asked me if Madame Lucille was essentially my mother but just “exaggerated a bit,” I had to admit that she was partially my mother but actually TONED DOWN some.

That made the group laugh, and then they started telling stories about their moms–all except for poor Allie, of course, who had to sit there, smiling and insisting that she had a perfectly normal, sane childhood with a loving mother and no problems whatsoever.

I think I owe her, big time.