I enjoyed this memoir mightily. Pittman is about 6 years younger than I am, and she's negotiating some territory very familiar to me. Her voice is wry but never snarky, revealing but not so intimate that one runs away scarred, and her bewilderment at times resonates deeply in my own echo chambers. It's a non-linear memoir, and it feels like an honest one. Recommended. ( )

Planting Dandelions by Kyran Pittman is a memoir in the form of a collection of essays. The book began its life as a blog — as so many memoirs these days seem to. The author is a regular contributor to Good Housekeeping.

I put those details forward because neither fact had any influence in me choosing this book — and perhaps might have some bearing on my overall reaction to it. I haven't read the author's blog (originally "Notes to Self" and later "Planting Dandelions") and the last time I read Good Housekeeping I was a teen and still living at home (in other words, it's been a long time).

What brought me to this book then was the title and the cover — a bouquet of dandelions. See my kids were going through a phase of actually planting dandelions in our balcony garden when I saw this book at the library.

The memoir / essays tell about Pittman's first marriage and the husband she left in Canada, and her move to Arkansas. There she met a new man, remarried and had three sons. Each new child ads a new level of complexity to her life.

So the gist of the book is: marriage is hard, being an adult is hard, Arkansas is really different from Canada, and being a parent is hard (but rewarding). Why yes — adulthood and parenthood is hard but that doesn't automatically make a book "relatable." ( )

I received an advanced reader copy of this book from the publisher way, way back in April. It has been at the top of my TBR pile since I received it, but other books kept pushing it down in the stacks. I finally got around to reading it this week.

And I’m happy I did. Planting Dandelions is a lovely collection of essays about marriage and families written by a woman who really never expected to find either in her life and who was totally amazed to discover how much marriage and family delighted her. Author Pittman doesn’t skim over the difficult days (which are pretty much every day when you are raising kids and maintaining a marriage) but her little essays are hilarious and clever and consoling to those of us who are in or have been in her shoes. ( )

I loved this book. It is really a series of essays that stand alone but together they create a cohesive accounting of the courtship, marriage, and subsequent motherhood of the author. At times the stories are quite funny, and always are entertaining. This is a memoir that is definitely worth reading. Some of the statements she makes are quite candid and I found myself thinking, "She's just like me!" many times as I read...which is what a memoir hopes to achieve, isn't it? ( )

I have not yet actually received this book from LibraryThing, but I got a library copy and read it anyway. Pittman's essays are, for the most part, charming and interesting---she manages to avoid the traps that some writers of books of this type seem to get into wherein they resort to raunchiness and pushing for shock value. I could have wished there were more specific stories about her family life, but at the same time I appreciate her desire to retain privacy for her children. Overall, a good read even for those whose lives do not resemble Pittman's---hers may not be the most unique voice out there, but I did not get tired of it and would welcome more from her. ( )