Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: You Are a Teen Mom: Instructions

Written by Randa Jarrar and Roxane Gay

Narrated by Randa Jarrar and Roxane Gay

The second installment in the series from Everand and Roxane Gay, the beloved bestselling author of Hunger, Bad Feminist, and Opinions. Memoirist, essayist, and novelist Randa Jarrar offers an honest and wholly original user’s manual on how to raise a happy and well-adjusted child with little help and even fewer resources, but a fierce willingness to live out loud.

She was a young college student, barely eighteen. As the daughter of overbearing immigrant parents, she reveled in the freedom of being away from home, having fun, spreading her wings. But then she got pregnant.

Life as a single mother is a challenge, even in the best of circumstances. If you’re like Randa Jarrar — young, marginalized, yet fiercely determined to get an education and forge a career — it’s seemingly impossible. Yet she did it, and she shares her story in this honest, deeply moving, and profanely funny how-to that parents of any age will find useful not just for raising a happy child but for keeping oneself sane, healthy, and fulfilled.

Randa, the author of the acclaimed books A Map of Home; Him, Me and Muhammad Ali; and the memoir Love Is an Ex-Country, came to parenthood with no expectations. As little more than a child herself, with a family who offered criticism but not much else, she more or less made it up as she went.

“Raising a child alone and working and going to school is doable,” she writes, “but you will need to do one at a time at first. See: a juggler’s instruction manual.”

Jarrar’s own juggling act yielded hard-won lessons you won’t find in other parenting guides. Without a partner or much disposable income, she relied on her wits and common sense to make the best life for herself and her son. As he grew up, so did she, working her way through graduate school, finding community among single moms like herself, and refusing to crumble beneath the societal presumption that, as a brown-skinned woman of limited means, she was doing it all wrong. By holding on to her confidence against all odds, she raised a young man any parent would be proud of while establishing herself as a respected author and professor.

But it was far from easy, and Jarrar’s missteps and misadventures offer readers both moments of great wisdom and hilarity. Her moving story, a series of thirty-three short chapters with instructive titles such as “How to Advocate for Your Child” and “How to Explain Easter to Your Muslim Child Who Doesn’t Realize He Is Muslim,” reflects the challenges that come with raising a child on your own. Parenthood, especially single parenthood, is a serious, ridiculous business, and Jarrar shows us there is no one way of doing it right.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everand Originals
• Release date: Feb 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781094470122

Randa Jarrar

Randa Jarrar is the author of the memoir Love Is An Ex-Country, the novel A Map of Home, and the collection of stories Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. She is also a performer who has appeared in independent films and in the TV show RAMY. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Salon, Bitch, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Award and an American Book Award, as well as awards and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and others. She lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews for Roxane Gay & Everand Originals

[Corey Linstrom · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jaw-dropping originality/ Time bending perspectives/ richly rewarding on so many levels

[TM Burkett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a honest telling of her experience as a young single mother in the United States. She is an immigrant, she is queer, she is Muslim, and she is doing the best she can to take care of her family and enjoy life in the process. She tells it like it is and she shares her mistakes. I appreciate her honesty and vulnerability in this short book.

[crf9fdjbxy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I’ve been a fan of Jarrar for years and this is, without a doubt, my favorite piece of writing that she’s ever done. This is some of the most heartfelt, touching, hilarious, poignant, brave, and teeming-with-joy writing I’ve ever experienced. Read it, then read it again and again.

[SYF Illustrations · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

40 minutes in and sadly not well written. Author is very narcissistic and only interested in telling her point of view in order to justify her actions.

[Elisa Cairns · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Horrible book! Can’t tell if it’s meant to be funny but it’s cringy

[Lane Blanchard · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Probably well meant, but...;pathetic? sad? No..., actually probably well meant.