What a catchy title! I saw this book on a client’s bookshelf and wondered what a spirited kid might think if he saw this on his mother’s bedside table: Yikes! I’ve gone too far! I’m being replaced!
As a parent who raised a strong-willed child, I also sense the miracle promised by this title: All our troubles solved within a week.
Hopefully, Have a New Kid by Friday has helped many families, but I doubt it truly delivers on its audacious promise. How could it? Most parent/child conflicts defy easy, overnight—or even one-week– solutions. No two family situations are exactly alike. But isn’t it tempting to buy a book that claims a sure-fire solution to our hardest problems?
My parents owned a lot of books, but only one parenting tome: Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care. I used to sneak into my parent’s bedroom and read sections–especially the chapters on puberty, just so I’d know what was coming– and perhaps it gave me a glimpse into that generation’s attitudes towards children. For better or worse, my mother consulted Dr. Spock at every stage. And in spite of its humdrum title, Baby and Child Care was a massive bestseller.
Today’s parents have thousands of titles to choose from, which must make choosing harder. But I’ll bet many an exasperated parent has thrown Have a New Kid by Friday into their cart without even glancing at the contents.
It’s a great title. Punchy, arresting, promising. As a writer, I know it’s hard to come up with memorable, attention-grabbing titles, and some authors—or their editors—seem better at it than others.
The title that gave me chills as a child was another from my parents’ bookshelf: Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. Once I overcame my initial fright, I tried several times to read it, but never got past the first few chapters. I vaguely remember a protagonist named Philip with a leg or foot infirmity—lameness? A club foot? My elementary school principal had a club foot, and apart from his oversized, bulbous shoe, he didn’t appear to be in bondage. (Not that I understood what bondage fully meant, but he seemed fine, if a little grumpy.) I decided Of Human Bondage didn’t deliver on its promising title, and moved on.
Paradise Road was the fourth or fifth title I came up with for my first memoir. It seems a good title, though I wouldn’t call it brilliant. ‘Paradise’ fits with the place and circumstances described in the final chapters of my story, and there’s a lot of ‘Road’ as I recount my bicycling odysseys. My work-in-progress titles—Runaway, The Girl Who Loved Too Much, Silky Green Parachute, DIY for the Newly-Bereaved– waxed and waned as I wrote, and I landed on my final pick almost by default.
My second, yet-to-be-published memoir is called The Box Must be Empty, which automatically felt like the right title. I’m struggling to come up with any title for my third memoir, about living in Bombay, and haven’t even attempted to title my current work in progress, about years spent in Africa. Unfortunately, Out of Africa has already been taken, or I’d use it.
So many memoirs have arresting titles: The Glass Castle, The Year of Magical Thinking, A Girl Named Zippy, My Stroke of Insight, Running with Scissors, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Let’s Pretend this Never Happened, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Center Cannot Hold, Autobiography of a Face, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. For me, most of these delivered on their great titles.
What are some of your favorite book titles? If you’re a writer, can you relate to the struggle of choosing a great title? Have you ever bought a book just for the title alone?