A wise, mild and enviably lucid book about a chaotic scene ... Is it OK to out your kid like this? ... Still, this memoir will seem like a better idea if, a few decades from now, Raffi is happy and healthy and can read it aloud to his own kids while chuckling at what a little miscreant he was ... Gessen is a wily parser of children’s literature ... He is just as good on parenting manuals ... Raising Raffi offers glimpses of what it’s like to eke out literary lives at the intersection of the Trump and Biden administrations ... Needing money for one’s children, throughout history, has made parents do desperate things — even write revealing parenthood memoirs ... Gessen’s short book is absorbing not because it delivers answers ... It’s absorbing because Gessen is a calm and observant writer...who raises, and struggles with, the right questions about himself and the world.

The Raffi essays raise fascinating and thorny questions about children’s rights to digital privacy, and how the internet has influenced our willingness to accept levels of access into people’s lives we would have once found unthinkable and likely grotesque ... I wanted to see Gessen grapple with these questions in Raising Raffi ... But Gessen’s new memoir is strangely devoid of reflection on the ethics of writing about his own child ... 'There was a particular gap, I thought, in the dad literature,”'he writes. 'In the few books out there, we were either stupid dad, who can’t do anything right, or superdad, a self-proclaimed feminist and caretaker.' Rather than charting a third course, Gessen sort of combines the two existing options, providing a voice for the voiceless: dads who don’t really know what they’re doing, but are well-educated and extremely involved and sure as hell going to overthink it ... Gessen’s writing about Raffi is sweet and exasperated and often quite funny — I found myself laughing aloud at his descriptions of their squabble ... But I felt sort of strange about it, too, the same feeling that comes over me when I realize I’ve become a little too invested in the Instagram presence of some couples I vaguely know ... Part of the problem here is that Raising Raffi doesn’t quite know what kind of book it’s trying to be ... Gessen’s ambivalence about how much of his culture to pass on to Raffi is the most interesting part of his memoir, precisely because it’s highly specific.

... his book proceeds as so many dad books don’t: with a father’s careful, piercing introspection, and a deep analysis of anger ... Gessen writes about his temperamental, trying son with a depth that can only come from years of loving observation ... Memoirs of fatherhood are rarely so honest or so blunt.

Simply by virtue of the fact that Gessen doesn’t treat the occupants of those prams as an obstacle to his writing career, he’s done something unique and valuable... I have to say: I feel seen ... Gessen is particularly good on the sheer bewilderment of the very earliest days of parenthood ... There’s no single line in Raising Raffi as good as Gould’s description in the Cut profile of her husband as 'the Christopher Columbus of mommy blogging.' Modern dads may be far more involved than many of their own fathers were — let alone Gessen’s male literary antecedents — but on average we still spend barely more than half the time mothers spend with their children. We desire some recognition that the act of modern fatherhood — a book we’re all in the process of writing — is worthy of close attention and effort, something Raising Raffi provides, but we’re also smart enough to know that our partners face even more pressure.

It is a paean to New York City, and how that city changed for him when he became a dad. The book also surveys the child development literature to which so many parents turn—some of us with deeper desperation. Parents will empathize with the strategy to look to books when toddler parenting gets tough; parents with toddlers prone to Raffi’s (and my Theo’s) particular brand of 'uncivil disobedience' might, like me, find themselves scribbling I FEEL SEEN on every other page ... Library Journal calls Raising Raffi 'engaging and better-written than many parenting books on the market.' I disagree. It is well written—snappy, smart, relatable—but the existence of “parenting books” by Rachel Cusk, Louise Erdrich, Anne Enright, Meaghan O’Connell, Anne Lamott, and Angela Garbes belies the 'better.' I wonder, with a pang of feminist pique, whether a woman writer would be commissioned to navigate the mire of baby books, from Drs. Spock and Sears to Dr. Becky, in such detail. I wonder whether her particular perspective, her kid-lit microreviews, would matter to a mainstream publisher ... And yet, I do feel seen. Gessen offers both investigative probe and personal confession; he’s both a critic and a dad. And, as a dad, his willingness to show his worst makes this book work. It also shows the kind of kid for whom the usual techniques will fail, and shows—but doesn’t forgive—a parent’s anger. It is not, despite delving into the advice canon, a book of advice itself (and is much better written than, say, Raising Your Spirited Child). But it’s one of the most honest accounts of the rage a parent can feel when personally victimized by their small children, even as they love those children with stupefying tenderness. I’ve never seen this reckoned with so candidly before: how you might respond with compassion and kindness (to both your child and yourself) when grappling with the real feelings of fear and betrayal when your slightly violent, very stubborn cherub [punches you in the balls] or [informs you he’s ripping up your Mother’s Day card out of sheer spite] ... Parents of kids (like Raffi, like Theo) who 'set a very particular tone' will relish Gessen’s bouts of candor. And understand, viscerally and truly, how this kind of child is worth every bite mark, every nosebleed, every sore spleen. Because they’re every bit as extreme in their less-violent qualities: loving, brilliant, generous, profound ... one of the tricky 'strengths' of Raising Raffi is the fact that Gessen is a man—gate-crashing a shelf long limited to women ... I wonder whether a mother would be free to rage like Gessen, then forgive herself her trespasses. To process on the page as he does ... I remain a fan, despite these reservations. There is so much in this book. Perhaps a chapter falters here and there ... As Dr. Becky might put it, two things are true: 1. This is the most honest mommy memoir I have ever read. 2. It could only have been written by a man.

... a book by and for dads somewhere in the middle of that spectrum: well-meaning, serious, flawed parents who know well enough the stereotype of the bumbling, arrogant paterfamilias they’re trying to avoid but also resist the sanctimony and even Sisyphean impossibility of the kind of father they might aspire to be. All the Confused Middle-Aged Literary Dads ... Every word dedicated to a self-conscious dadhood is also, by definition, a self-indulgent one. Gessen gets that ... That self-indulgence is both a constraint of Raising Raffi and its shadow subject. This is, in other words, not just a book about fatherhood but a book about the idea of writing about fatherhood ... Gessen, the thinker, sees the flaws in that ideal, but Gessen the parent can’t help but feel the power of it. That awkwardness provides both insight and comedy ... the place where the book most clearly displays dadlike innocence is in its form. Especially in comparison with the more lyrical or experimental examples of mom lit, this piece of dad lit is relatively matter-of-fact ... At worst, this tour of discovery yields frustratingly abrupt or cursory considerations of parenting topics otherwise covered at epic length elsewhere; at best, it offers a sharp sense of wonder about the quotidian details of fatherhood. Gessen’s admittedly limited knowledge—the ignorance of all fathers—is, then, the limitation of the book but also the feature that makes it illuminating.

... will res­onate with any­one who has raised a child, give pause to those who antic­i­pate doing so, and fas­ci­nate those who do not expect to have this par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence ... The read­er accom­pa­nies Gessen and his wife, Emi­ly, on this glo­ri­ous, ter­ri­fy­ing, often unnerv­ing, but always com­pelling, jour­ney as their squirmy, noisy infant begins to devel­op a per­son­al­i­ty and a style of his own, neces­si­tat­ing growth and a new world of under­stand­ing on the parts of his par­ents. Raf­fi becomes a charm­ing­ly ram­bunc­tious tod­dler and, lat­er, a ver­bal and inter­est­ing child ... Gessen is unfail­ing­ly thought­ful and ana­lyt­ic as he describes his dai­ly life in an engag­ing and forth­right man­ner. He makes it clear that life with a child isn’t all obsta­cles and chal­lenges, although there are plen­ty of those; there’s a lot of fun, as well. Still, the respon­si­bil­i­ties are weighty even dur­ing the best of moments. He pro­vides no firm answers, but his expe­ri­ence encour­ages oth­er new par­ents, reas­sur­ing them that this daunt­ing task is worth­while and ful­fill­ing. He focus­es on the use of instinct and com­mon sense (although he read many par­ent­ing advice books), and he acknowl­edges his many frus­tra­tions and mis­takes, although it is very clear that even the mis­steps were made with love ... This is a jour­ney and an evo­lu­tion as read­ers watch Gessen devel­op into the father he wants to be. As they watch, they smile, they sigh, they admire, they shud­der (just a bit), and they enjoy watch­ing Raf­fi grow through his father’s lov­ing eyes.

Gessen covers all the basics: from the intricacies of a home birth, through toddler temper tantrums, to the fraught process of choosing a school. And let me placate any sceptics who might be wary of the potential self-absorption involved when a middle-class Brooklynite waxes lyrical about their parental angst: Gessen is not above scrutinising his own myopia ... Given the bedlam it describes, Raising Raffi/em> is impressively clear-sighted, entertaining and analytical — but it would be remiss of me not to point out that it’s also the kind of book that plenty of equally intelligent women have been writing for years.