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.

"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

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