Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo?: And Other Questions I Wish I Never Had to Ask

By Jancee Dunn

Despite her forty years and a successful career as a rock journalist, Jancee Dunn still feels like a teenager, especially around her parents and sisters. Looking around, Dunn realizes that she’s not alone in this regression: Her friends, all with successful jobs, marriages, and families of their own, still feel like kids around their moms and dads, too. That gets Dunn to thinking: Do we ever really grow up?

Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo? explores this phenomenon–through both Dunn’s coming to grips with getting older and her folks’ attempts to turn back the clock. In a series of hilarious and heartwarming essays, Dunn conspires with her sisters to finagle their way into the old family homestead, dissects the whys and wherefores of her parents’ obsession with newspaper clippings, confronts the seamy side of the JC Penney catalogs she paged through as a kid, and accompanies her sixtysomething mother to a New Jersey tattoo parlor, where Mom is giddy to get a raven inked onto her wrist. And Dunn does it all with humor and insight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 23, 2009
• ISBN: 9780345515285

Jancee Dunn

Jancee Dunn has written three books, including the rock memoir But Enough About Me. She writes for many publications, including The New York Times, Vogue, and O, The Oprah Magazine.

Reviews for Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo?

[rdra1962 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Entertaining but not that funny. Great title though!

[ownedbycats · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

i love her essays/stories about her life and family! talented writter, and i look forward to her writing more books!

[satyridae · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Dunn is a strange phenom in the world of 40-something memoirists. She's practically ordinary. She's someone you recognize. She doesn't shoot heroin, she doesn't fess up to being sexually abused at the hands of her kindergarten teacher, she doesn't have 13 cats. She's got a soft heart, an incisive wit that isn't wounding, and a family so dotty they could be English. I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would at the outset, once I settled into the sheer comfort of stories about a family who... wait for it... love each other to distraction. Almost like Erma Bombeck, but not smarmy. I dug it.

[bookwormteri · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoy Jancee's books. It's like sitting down with a really good friend over cocktails and bitching and laughing about everything in your life.

[voracious_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

You can't not like Jancee Dunn. Jancee is the best girlfriend you wish you had... the one you can call every morning at 9:07 to share your "water cooler" talk before getting started on your day. Jancee doesn't hesitate to share the full gamut of her neuroses with you. She is an obsessive cleaner, has two hour phone conversations with her family on speakerphone to decide the details of the Thanksgiving meal planning, and is so preoccupied on conscientious social behavior that her husband tells her not to be "wierd". Somehow her quirks make her that much more like anybody else and though flawed, she has a fantastic sense of humor. I must admit that I have enjoyed her other two books more than this one. Though endearing in many ways, this novel didn't have the focus of her first memoir and wasn't as funny as either. I thought the verbatim conversations between Julie and Jancee were a little mundane, though they did illuminate that every family has quirks. Jancee's relationship with Julie were somewhat interesting as Julie is also a published author and these conversations provided an atypical and privileged angle into their relationship. I also enjoyed watching Jancee struggle with the concept of motherhood and how it so deeply impacted her family. Though it wasn't my favorite, I still look forward to Jancee's next book and wonder if it will be another autobiographical adventure or another pop-culture studded novel?

[florinda_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I genuinely enjoy reading Jancee Dunn. She's worked for Rolling Stone and O: The Oprah Magazine, she's been an MTV veejay and a Good Morning, America correspondent, and she's written one novel and two books of nonfiction - and yet her voice throughout remains down-to-earth and conversational.Her most recent book is a collection of memoir/essays concerning recent events in the lives of her family, who we first got to know in But Enough About Me. The Dunns have their quirks, but they're ordinary quirks, if that makes sense. Jancee, her sisters, and her parents have remained close geographically and emotionally, and they discuss everything - spouses just have to get used to that. Readers become part of those discussions, which may ring familiar if you also come from a close, chatty family. Jancee shares the clippings about random topics her recently retired parents send her in the mail; in my family it's more likely to be e-mails, but it's the same idea. She relates transcripts of her daily phone calls with her best friend, Julie. She talks about her fear of heights, her love for catalogs, her unexpected - and entirely welcome - pregnancy at the age of forty-one...and yes, accompanying her mother to get that tattoo. She doesn't overshare, but her writing is both intimate and humorous, and as a reader, she makes me feel entirely welcome too.Jancee Dunn's stories engage me, strike notes of familiarity, and make me chuckle in both recognition and appreciation of their humor. When I reviewed her first memoir, But Enough About Me, I said that I'd want to hang out with her, and I still do.

[mkschoen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The 80s and Jersey references are heaven for a nostaligia nut like me, but Dunn is really, really funny. She talks about her relationship with her parets without *talking* about it; and I want to meet her friend Julie and have coffee (but only before 3!)

[kristenn_43 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A sweet, fun book. First thing by her that I've read. We're basically the same age and have a fair amount in common (including a recently-tattooed mother) so quite a bit was relatable. The humor is more Sandra Tsing Loh than Laurie Notaro -- very little in the way of snark or bodily fluids.