Every memoir has two stories hiding inside it: the one on the page, and the one about how it got written. For Ann Walton, author of Screaming Teddy Bears: True Tales of Motherhood, Mischief, and Mayhem, that second story is almost as entertaining as the first.
Walton didn’t set out to write a polished, conventional parenting memoir, and she’ll tell you that herself. “The second I stopped trying to write Literature and just started telling the truth, badly, bluntly, and with a sense of humor about myself, the stories finally sounded like me,” she says. That shift shows on every page. These aren’t softened, hindsight-polished anecdotes. They’re stories that still have their teeth in.
A lot of readers assume Walton’s wicked sense of humor is just a personality quirk. She disagrees. “People read about me pouring red ink in a bathtub or outsmarting my own kids with the Disneyland trick, and they assume I came up with this on my own. I didn’t. I inherited it.” Her father, born in 1924 and seemingly incapable of letting an opportunity for chaos pass him by, looms over the early chapters of the book for exactly that reason. Once Walton realized her own instincts weren’t random, they were family legacy, the book’s spine fell into place around that idea.
Not every story was easy to put back on the page, though. The pool chapter, in particular, pulled her right back into the moment. “That split-second where your brain refuses to process what you’re seeing,” she says of writing it, “I was right back there for a second.” But she resisted the urge to smooth it over. “Parenting isn’t just the funny stuff. It’s also the terror right before the funny stuff. I didn’t want to sand off that edge.” It’s that honesty, laughter and fear sitting right next to each other, that gives the book its particular texture. You’re never more than a page away from either one.
Then there are the stories that are just, in her words, pure Tuesday. The now-famous veal debate, in which she convinces her husband Dan that “veal” is a cuddly farm animal rather than a cut of meat, wasn’t crafted for an audience at all. “I was just bored in a car with Dan, and bratty, as I freely admit I can be,” she says. “None of these were planned bits. They were just Tuesday. I think that’s why they hold up. I wasn’t performing for an audience, I was just living my life and being a little bit evil to the people I love most.”
So how did Walton decide what made the final cut out of what she admits is a much, much larger pool of family stories? Her method was refreshingly unscientific. “If I found myself telling it at a dinner party for the hundredth time and people still laughed, it made the cut.” Everything else, including, by her own admission, some even more unhinged material, got set aside for later.
Underneath all the chaos, though, Walton has a genuine hope for her readers, particularly other mothers who feel like their own family life doesn’t look like the version on social media. “Motherhood gets presented so often as this precious, Pinterest-worthy thing, and for a lot of us, it’s actually just absurd,” she says. “I want readers to feel permission to laugh at their own version of that, instead of feeling like they’re doing it wrong.”
That permission, to find your own chaos funny instead of shameful, might be the real heart of Screaming Teddy Bears. The pranks and the panic and the ice cream cons are the entertainment. The permission is the gift.