May Contain Nuts
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By John O'Farrell
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Alice and David are worried parents. Are their children falling behind with their schoolwork, their music lessons and the number of sleepover invitations received this month? Or are all these extra lessons causing them to miss out on physical exercise? Maybe they could find a maths tutor who’d be prepared to swim alongside them and explain binary numbers while the children practiced their breast-stroke? This permanent sense of crisis is coming to a climax as their eldest child looks set to fail her entrance exam for the hallowed school on which they have pinned all their hopes. Many mothers can’t help wanting to do everything for their children, but Alice takes this controlling maternal obsession one step further. She takes the test in place of her daughter. With a baseball cap pulled low over her face, she shuffles into a hall of a two hundred kids and faces her first examination for twenty years. But it is only once she puts herself in the place of one her children that she starts to realise the sort of exhausting pressures that her kids have been under…
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Read as one of our very first books a few years ago most members of The Reading Army found the book to be engaging, funny and witty, and very difficult to put down to the extent of receiving threats from their children that they would ban mum’s book as they were enjoying it so much and laughing out loud! One or two, however, did admit that they had found the story to have become mundane quite quickly and had found it to be too removed from reality. We all agreed that the storyline was over exaggerated, and that noone would go to the lengths that Alice did to ensure that she gained what she perceived to be the best for her child-but then again, if we could get away with it, who knows, perhaps we would!
The storyline of overbearing parents gave rise to some quite serious discussions on how indeed we are bringing up our children and what we could do to balance their happiness (and ours) with what many parents feel is necessary for their children. Are we being over protective? What does it mean to be a ‘good’ parent? Are the approaches we use and the insecurities we have affecting our well-being as well as our childrens’? Alice for one was not completely relaxed until she let go of her need to ‘control’ her childrens’ every waking moments although we still find her spying on her daughter at the end:)
An important message for all mums out there is that we are not just mums, we are also individuals with our own identity, ‘Molly’s mum is only half a person. Alice Chaplin, that is me, that is the entire thing.’ For all of us ‘May Contain Nuts’ will have made us relook at our roles as parents and I’m sure we’ll all become a little different in our approaches to parenthood as a result. One member talked about a very touching poem ‘On Children’ by Kahhil Gibran where he says ‘And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.... You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts’; definitely worth a read.
‘May Contain Nuts’ however, not only questioned the methods of how we raise our children but also challenged stereotypes including class and race, and if one looks even closer, then you can see that O’Farrell has cleverly managed to make a political statement too! We take so many things for granted and get caught up in our little bubbles without a thought of how so many people around us are living within so little means yet are so generous, kind and happy-this book was a good reminder of the world around us and of how we take so many things for granted. Most definitely worth a read!
