"Within the first few pages, however, I was disappointed to find that these characters were essentially a collection of the same old incompetent-dad tropes: unemployable, emasculated, blundering, or, in the case of Lamb's book, tragically negligent."
"I never used to be a reader who needed to see himself in a novel. But as a dad who takes pride in bringing fun and, if I may say so, some skill to the role, I've grown tired of cultural stereotypes that reduce stay-at-home fathers to undignified buffoons."
"I started by asking people I knew for recommendations. But my novelist friends couldn't think of any full-time-dad characters; neither could the stay-at-home dads I knew. Soon I grew a bit obsessed-and, through my own detective work, ended up compiling what is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive list of stay-at-home dads in novels."
A stay-at-home father frustrated by stereotypical portrayals of his role in recent novels embarked on a comprehensive search through literary archives to identify how stay-at-home dads are represented in fiction. After discovering that two well-reviewed novels featuring stay-at-home-dad protagonists relied on tired tropes of incompetence and emasculation, he sought recommendations from novelist friends and other stay-at-home fathers, finding few examples. Determined to document the landscape, he conducted extensive research through newspaper archives, library databases, bookselling websites, and Publishers Marketplace, compiling what he believes is the most comprehensive list of stay-at-home dads in novels dating back to the 1970s, a period when such fathers were virtually nonexistent in real life.
#stay-at-home-fathers #literary-representation #gender-stereotypes #character-portrayal #cultural-narratives
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