‘Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids’ - NYTimes.com

‘Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids’ - NYTimes.com:

"The 16 essays are cleverly arranged, creating a satisfying intellectual and emotional arc. The book opens with an appeal to the heart, by Courtney Hodell (who is, full disclosure, my friend) — a chronicle of how it felt to watch her gay brother break their mutual vow of childlessness — and concludes with Tim Kreider’s rousing defense of the child-free as “an experiment unprecedented in human history. . . . A kind of existential vanguard, forced by our own choices to face the naked question of existence with fewer illusions, or at least fewer consolations, than the rest of humanity, forced to prove ourselves anew every day that extinction does not negate meaning.” Along the way, the reader is treated to nearly every reason one might choose to forgo having children: Pam Houston loving her freedom too much to ever let it go; Elliott Holt’s suspicion that her history of depression would make her an unfit parent; Anna Holmes’s allergy to “the creeping commodification of childhood in the form of must-have status symbols” (among other reasons)."

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