Mama Lama Ding Dong

Twenty years ago, a mother named Erma Bombeck brought the suburban family out of the closet -- dirty laundry and all. Her candid, hilarious accounts of family life became more than mere books; they became a philosophy. Meet Ayun Halliday, a new generation's urban Bombeck. Creator of the underground parenting magazine The East Village Inky, Halliday's words and drawings detail the quirks and everyday travails of a young Brooklyn family, warts and all. Honest in her parenting foibles and fixed in her opinions on public breastfeeding and the perfect Halloween costume, Halliday validates the complex, absurd wonderousness of being the unpaid caregiver of small children and celebrates the stranger-than-fiction, real-life existence of one modern family.