Adam Mansbach
Adam Mansbach
Adam Mansbachis an American author, and has previously been a visiting writer and professor of literature at Rutgers University-Camden, with their New Voices Visiting Writers program. Mansbach wrote the "children's book for adults" Go the Fuck to Sleep. Other books Mansbach has written include Angry Black White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005, and The End of the Jews. Mansbach was the founding editor of the 1990s hip-hop journal Elementary. He lives in Berkeley, California and co-hosts...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 July 1976
CountryUnited States of America
One of the pleasures of getting older and making a living the way you want to is that your social circle becomes rarified, and the people who enter have been vetted.
Ultimately, very few people parent their kids in ways that strike anybody else as reasoned, appropriate or sane.
I've probably done more than a thousand interviews, and I can't remember what people asked me two months ago or two days ago.
I came up in hip-hop, where people value the ability to tell it straight.
Graffiti writers were the most interesting people in hip hop. They were the mad scientists, the mad geniuses, the weird ones.
How do you sustain yourself when all the old structures people looked to for support - religion, family, ethnic solidarity - are crumbling, or feel so false that you refuse to avail yourself of them? What comes next?
The paradox of being in an industry where other people are usually the gatekeepers: publishers, editors - there are a lot of barriers to having control over your career. But coming out of hip-hop, the mindset was always to create your own.
To be a white kid into hip-hop meant you'd sought it out and you practiced the art. Which meant dedication and diligence, as well as removing yourself at least occasionally from your own comfort zone and circumstances, and from people who looked like you.
I think there's a lot of anxiety about being seen as a bad parent. There's still a lot of subjects that I think people aren't entirely comfortable being honest about.
Sleeping is one of the more private aspects of parenting; it happens in a quiet room, whereas eating is a more public aspect of parenting. Other people can see it and compare it to what their kids eat.
The publishing industry stopped having new ideas out of respect for the untimely death of Ernest Hemingway in 1961 and has been doing everything the same way ever since.
I've planned book tours for myself, whether or not anybody wants to hear what I have to say. I've weighed in on things like what the cover looks like, what the copy looks like, how it's going to be promoted - just every aspect of it.
The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.
Sometimes, it's best to let the kids take control - and it's never too early to instill positive eating habits or self-confidence in the kitchen.