Taking up the teen challenge
WRITER Joanne Fedler long suspected that her latest book – an often hilarious, always frank, no-holds-barred account of raising teenagers – would be thought-provoking, yet nothing could have prepared the mother of two for the intensity of the response to Love In the Time of Contempt: Consolations for Parents of Teenagers.
“The emails and reviews I’ve received from people have almost made me cry, they were so moving,” she says.
“I actually didn’t realise that it would have such a huge impact on people. Obviously, people are feeling very lonely in this business of raising their teenagers, and now they have perhaps felt like they’ve been heard or that someone recognises what they’re going through. So I’ve been blown away by the reaction.”
Of course, there have also been those who have voiced very different opinions, none of which have fazed Fedler in the least.
“There are times when I’m brutally honest, and some people have not agreed with some of the things I’ve said, which I think is fantastic,” she exclaims about the book, which has just been released by publisher Hardie Grant in Australia and Britain and by Jacana in South Africa.
“It means that people are thinking their own way about how they want to parent their teenagers. There are no answers and we all have different values around sexuality, drugs and compliance and how we want our kids to behave.”
While the happily married Fedler is the first to acknowledge she’s not a psychologist or an academic, she does have a 17-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son. Clearly, then, she is qualified by experience to put pen to paper and chronicle this particular chapter in the parenting journey.
For, as Fedler says, truth is way scarier than fiction when it comes to teenagers.
“I read a lot of books on parenting teenagers and, oh gosh, they’re so humourless. They just sound like they’re lecturing and you end up feeling like a teenager who is being told how to do it,” she says.
“This book was really meant as a comfort to other parents, so that they can see that what’s going on in their homes is so normal.
“We’re all actually going through the same thing and we should remember that we were all once teenagers ourselves, and that we did a lot of the things we don’t want our teenagers to do.
“Our teenagers need to know we’re there for them, that we have their backs and there’s nothing they can say that’s going to freak us out.”
But how did Fedlers’ children, whose names have been changed in the book to protect their privacy, feel about their mother’s latest work, which happens to be largely about them?
“When I finished writing the book, I asked both my kids to read it because I wanted them to be completely okay with it, in the same way as I sent all the chapters on to the people I’d interviewed,” she says.
“My son was like ‘Nah, I’m not reading that!’ So my husband read it on his behalf and he thought it was fine. My daughter read the book and she thought teenagers should read it and give it to their parents, as she felt it is very compassionate towards teenagers. Once I got her stamp of approval, I thought that was okay.”
Born in Johannesburg, Fedler studied law at Yale University and worked as a law lecturer and a women’s rights advocate before migrating to Sydney in 2001 and embarking on a successful new career as a writer.
Certainly, Fedler – now the author of nine books – has never shied away from telling it as it is, warts and all.
“My books When Hungry, Eat and Secret Mothers’ Business are all about motherhood and relationships,” she says.
“My writing voice is one where I do try to tell the truth about experience and sometimes that truth is really hard, especially when you’re looking at yourself critically and trying to be honest about yourself.
“But there has been such an amazing reaction to my other books, and I think it’s because I’m not afraid to be honest about how I’m feeling. I do think it gives other people permission to feel these complex reactions to things.
“What I’m saying in Secret Mother’s Business and here [in Love In the Time of Contempt] is not to romanticise or to catastrophise any experience – that every experience is rich and full of beauty and horror. What I also try to do in my writing is to laugh at myself and not take myself too seriously.”
Undoubtedly, at the end of the day, despite all the pulling-your-hair-out moments, there’s much to relish about living with teenagers.
“It’s so important to share stories with our teens, to laugh at ourselves because we can see ourselves through their eyes, and to understand how precious the time is that we have with them,” Fedler reflects.
“This is basically the last time we really have to parent in a very real way before they leave us. The next stage for us is the empty nest, so why not revel in the time you have with them, enjoy them for who they are and the people they are becoming? I definitely do hope that the message of my book is a positive one.”
Love In the Time of Contempt: Consolations for Parents of Teenagers is published by Hardie Grant Books, $26.95 (rrp).
REPORT by Jackie Brygel
PHOTO of author Joanne Fedler. Photo: Noel Kessel
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