The Lunch-Box Chronicles

Child Magazine Best Book of the Year

"For me, parenting is like dieting.  Every day, I wake up filled with resolve and good intentions, perfection in view, and every day I somehow stray from the path.  The difference is with dieting, I usually make it to lunch. . . ."

   With the candor and often hilarious outlook that have made her a beloved commentator on NPR, Marion Winik takes the reader on an unforgettable journey through modern parenthood, with all of its attendant anxieties and joys.
        A single mother with two small boys, Winik knows exactly what she's talking about, from battles over breakfast and bedtime to the virtues of pre-packaged food and weightier issues like sex education and sibling rivalry. Part memoir and part survival guide, The Lunch-Box Chronicles is an engaging philosophy of parenting from a staunch realist, who knows that kids and their parents both will inevitably fall far short of perfection, and that a "good enough mom" really is, in fact, good enough.

"Take Erma Bombeck, add the obsession of a single mother with two boys... and you have Marion Winik, as companionable writer as a crazed parent ever found."- The New York Times Book Review

"Marion Winik proves as able a bard for her generation as Erma Bombeck was for hers... Funny, warmhearted, and chock-full of moments of instant recognition."- Newsday

"[H]ilarious and wrenching, it's about being a parent, but it's also about so much more: love, survival, transcendence—and macaroni and cheese."- Anne Lamott, author of Operating Instructions

Marion Winik has been a regular commentator on Nation Public Radio's All things Considered since 1991. Her writing appears regularly in magazines, newspapers and online.  She is the author of both Telling and First Comes Love (both available from Vintage Books).