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Fun with blurbs (Rebecca Eckler edition)

The other day a finished copy of Rebecca Eckler’s new memoir, Wiped, arrived here at the Q&Q home office, complete with a press release that included some admiring blurbs of Eckler’s first book, Knocked Up. A couple of those caught Quillblog’s attention and seemed to bear further investigation. So for comparative purposes:

From the Key Porter press release:

“This mommy memoir feels like a humorous crash course in maturity.” – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

The full sentence in the original review (you can see the complete review here, under “Editorial Reviews”):

Sometimes this mommy memoir feels like a humorous crash course in maturity, though at other points the author’s attitude comes dangerously close to that of one who has a baby as a chic accessory.

From the Key Porter press release:

“A downtown girl attempts a stylish switch to yummy mommy. There appears to be no detail she’s reluctant to share. This isn’t supposed to be a parenting manual; it’s meant to be a funny, lighthearted take on life in transition! – THE TORONTO STAR

Really? An exclamation mark after transition? Well, no. Here’s the full Star piece, with the blurbed bits in bold:

In which a downtown girl attempts a stylish switch to yummy mommy
Rebecca Eckler is the poster girl for a younger generation of self-absorbed Toronto columnists whose favourite subject is, well, themselves. As one of the “kids” hired by the National Post, Eckler is apparently of the belief that the trials and travails of a young woman in the social swirl of the local media pack is of pressing interest. Now, one has to give a kind of grudging nod to Eckler’s enthusiasm, whatever one thinks of the content of her work. There appears to be no private detail she’s reluctant to share, from her sex life to her difficulty with such challenges as getting up on time and balancing her chequebook. So it’s perhaps unfair to have hoped for anything from Eckler in the way of serious contemplation of the grownup life in Knocked Up: Confessions Of A Modern Mother-to-be (Anchor Canada, 374 pages, $22.95), her diary of last year’s pregnancy and the birth of baby Rowan. This isn’t supposed to be a parenting manual; it’s meant to be a funny, lighthearted take on a life in transition. And if you look closely, you may find encouraging evidence, amid all the fretting about weight gain and the benefits of an elective C-section, that wee Rowan may yet be in responsible hands. Eckler, a week after her baby is born, reads a piece a certain Sexy Young Intern has written about a new bar that features waitresses who dance on the bar counter. Somebody skinnier is muscling in on her beat! “I have a baby now, and bar hopping seems, well, not so important to me anymore,” Eckler ponders. “She can have my old job, I think. I barely have time to read the newspaper anyway.”

Read Q&Q‘s review of Wiped here.