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The Big Rumpus 
Listen to The Critics:
What comes out in this book that doesn't usually show up in the tone of the zine are the challenges that arise as a parent. How to balance your life with small ones and how to deal with and accept the changes in time management and self-indulgent hobbies and passions. Yet Ayun does all this — bares her soul so to speak, raises her kids, gets out into the world with her kids and shares her experiences. I enjoyed the in-depth stories about going into labor, the birthing center and ending up in the hospital. The ways in which things don't end up quite how you dreamed or planned — and the ways in which you modify your life to accommodate. I feel like that sounds a bit grim, and it shouldn't because the very existence of this book, backed by the awesome and consistent quarterly zine is proof that Ayun rules. And her creativity, humor and candid honesty are really inspirations. This is the kind of book that I want to give all my already or soon-to-be or just-thinking-about-one-day-being parent friends.
Funny, surprisingly well-written chronicle of a young
bohemian family living in New York City. Perfect for stay-at-home moms who
believe in natural birth and granola.
I am wary of personal zines. It's really hard to be compelled by the endless stories of people doing the same things, over and over again-there's only so much I can read about riding bikes, the end of romantic relationships between people I've never met, and interviews with bands that have nothing interesting to say. If you read a lot of zines, you can usually tell by the third sentence if you want to throw the thing out of the window. People who write about their own lives have an incredible challenge--to write engagingly about something that is usually pretty mundane. This is one of the things that impresses me about The East Village Inky, Ayun Halliday's quarterly zine. Her new book, The Big Rumpus, is essentially a long-form version of the zine. Inky began as an East Village restaurant review zine, and morphed into Ayun's chronicle of her life with her two kids, India and (later) Milo. The book goes into detail about the births of both of her kids (and the subsequent birth of the zine), and is shot through with remembrances of her childhood, discussions of holidays, rants about breastfeeding, and the wonders of living in New York City. Her frazzled illustrations of herself are spot-on portraits of everyone I know who has kids. Of course, the more you are interested in motherhood, kids, New York City, zine writing, and the other things Ayun cares about, the more you're going to be pre-disposed to like the book. But, I promise, her prose style is snarky enough, reflective enough, and funny enough that the book is totally worth checking out. The book is perfect to read when you've been up way too long, your hair is sticking out all over the place, and you'd like to think about something else besides whatever it is you're supposed to be doing.
If there could ever be a book of party stories about raising kids, this is it. Picking up where Erma Bombeck left off, Ayun Halliday, off-off Broadway actress brings her inimitable, biting wit and inexhaustible supply of joie de vivre to the daily theater of the absurd that is family life in the big city. Blending caustic humor with the exuberant joy of watching her children grow to the point where they can match her one-liner for one-liner. Any stroller-mom, urban especially, will relate to the chaos unraveled and immortalized in this hilarious new book.
Parent This: Like most women coming up in the seventies and eighties, Ayun Halliday
blithely thought she'd continue her career after her children were born.
But by daughter India's first birthday, Halliday found herself in Glasgow
with a wriggling, chattering distraction that placed her theatrical pursuits
on indefinite hold. "I came back to New York in despair that this little
daughter whom I loved so dearly was going to cut me out of all the fun stuff
- painting the stage at two in the morning, arguing about aesthetics and
hanging out in unfriendly bars after poorly attended, poorly performed
shows," she writes. Instead, she turned out an underground zine, The East
Village Inky, and now her first book, The Big Rumpus: A Mother's Tales from
the Trenches (Seal Press, $15.95), in which she writes frankly about the
day-to-day insults and humiliations of mothering two toddlers in the city.
Her irreverent, sarcastic and occasionally scatological style (no accident,
perhaps, that her husband, Greg Kotis co-wrote Urinetown) will remind you of
a phone conversation with your best friend. Through restaurant windows, she
spies on "leather-clad couples enjoying seventeen-dollar plates of
postcoital polenta." Breast feeding brings out her more restrained side:
"Wipe that stupid sneer off your face, or I'll shove this Barbie umbrella up
your ass," she thinks as strangers give her the look. In the final chapter,
a love note to her pudgy baby boy Milo, Halliday becomes a big ol' mush pot:
"I am drunk on your pulchritude." Think Mother's Day gift.
Of the many stay-at-home mommies who dream of writing the Great American Novel, few actually try; fewer still get published. Though not a novel, The Big Rumpus certainly is the Great American Tale of one woman's schlep through early motherhood--honest, hilarious, and irresistibly naughty. Ayun Halliday, a highly caffeinated and refreshingly immodest city gal, acknowledges that motherhood is pretty much like contending with a cloud of locusts swarming toward one's wheat--then laughs her "heiner" off about it.
From the exuberant publisher, writer, and creator of the quarterly 'zine The East Village Inky, a breezy memoir of motherhood that for all its hip attitude also affectingly recalls traditional fears, joys, and a sense of the miraculous. Halliday begins with a prologue in which she explains how she came to create the 'zine and in so doing saved her mind. She had always wanted to write, but not until daughter India (Inky) was one year old did she realize that she had the subject matter right at hand, as well as a welcome alternative to sitting at home "staring at the congealed blobs of baby food I was too fried to sponge off the walls." The 'zine gave her an excuse to wander around New York with Inky on her back, looking for material. Halliday now has another child, son Milo, and continues to publish The East Village Inky, whose success she attributes to the fact that in its pages "not a lot happens." Her memoir chronicles a life that changed forever after she gave birth and learned that the baby "would like to remind you that she is now the primary reason you were put on earth." Halliday describes the usual rites of motherhood: her children's births (one easy, one complicated by a postnatal infection), breastfeeding ("I don't mind if people see. . . . It's a life-affirming, nonviolent, free-to the-public moment that makes the world a slightly better place"), and celebrating the holidays, during which her good resolutions about homemade decorations began to waver when she realized how much time it took to craft valentines or stain Easter eggs, when five minutes in the nearby Rite-Aid would provide everything she needed. She also movingly acknowledges her infatuation with her chubby baby ("I loved you beyond reason. I am drunk on your pulchritude") as well as her fears of death and loss. Motherhood recalled with engaging brio and considerable wisdom.
The Whole Enchilada: Ayun Halliday is the perfect combination of artsy New York sophistication and Midwest down-to-earth modesty. She manages to reach into the reader's heart and mind, extract everything most real and vital about motherhood and spread that knowledge and love out for all to see. Nobody can make you feel as proud about having gone through the delousing experience as Ayun does in "Nitpicking." Nobody articulates the unthinkable so clearly, so beautifully horribly, as Ayun does in "Spare Us." She does all this by sharing her own stories, told with the same sideways earnest wit that makes countless subscribers squeal with pleasure when the latest East Village Inky arrives in the mailbox. Only, The Big Rumpus has more words (lots of 'em!), less pictures and an even bigger heart. EVI is the still-warm chips and fresh salsa that brings you into the restaurant; The Big Rumpus is the Burrito Grande. Yum.
Built on the bones of her four-year-old zine, The East Village Inky, Halliday's book expands on the experiences of (in her phrase) "a certain transplanted Hoosier mother tromping around Brooklyn, the East Village and several subway lines, more or less joyously burdened with an infant, a coughing three-thumbed three-year-old
desperate to kiss him, a big broken orange bag, a Bug's Life lunchbox, an
ill-advised plastic sackful of bulk food and a deteriorating stroller." Fans of
her quarterly, hand-lettered, forty-page zine will find the same irreverent,
self-deprecating tone in Halliday's tales of rearing her young in the asphalt
jungle (though they'll have to settle for a mere half dozen of her endearingly
quirky pen-and-ink illustrations). A former massage therapist, off-off-Broadway
actress, and waitress, Halliday had feared that her urban hipster life was over
after the birth of her first child, India (the eponymous "Inky"). Instead,
she's transformed the minutiae of their daily doings into these funky and often
touching stories that embrace universal themes (high-spirited preschoolers,
sleep deprivation, weaning) while providing a nose-against-the-glass tour of
big city life with kids: falafel joints, rooftop parties, and multi-culti
friendships forged on tarmacked playgrounds. Mommy voyeurism at its best.
Ayun ought to get Mother of the Year for this one. The Big Rumpus (Seal Press, 2002)
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