The Sophist 4: The one about a book called Why Men Love Bitches ruining your life

To my daughter, who recently turned five.

I will never forget the day you began to read. When you first realised that the letters coming out of your mouth were turning into a word, as you said them, one after the other - it was like watching alchemy happen. I squealed with joy when you looked at that screen in front of you and sounded out the letters - N E T F L I X - because it was Saturday morning and I had a hangover and you knew this was your opportunity to ask for that heinous Barbie cartoon. Netflix was the first word you ever read, and now you are tackling whole sentences, and you keep writing all these lovely things for your teachers about how much you love our cat, which would make me so proud if we actually had a cat. (Of course, the first words you ever spoke were uttered years earlier, and one day I will explain to you why those words were Abu Hamza. I am not making this up. Your father wasn’t around, I watched a lot of news, you started saying "ABU HA!" every time he came on. I think everyone looks for a male authority figure somewhere.) Anyway, I’m so excited about your reading skills that I now want to give you some tips for your future in literature. So I’ve decided to write you a list of all the books that, when you’re older, I hope you never read, because they are a festering pile of absolute shite.

Seriously, don’t go anywhere near the following. THESE ARE VERY BAD BOOKS INDEED.

1) 'Why Men Love Bitches' by some idiot.

I don’t even want to look this up to remind myself who wrote it. Whatever her name is, she needs bringing to justice. This book is responsible for so much foolishness in my life that it makes me think that book burning, censorship and Lady Chatterley style trials should make an immediate comeback. It basically tells you that men won’t like you if you are nice to them, and that you should treat them mean, and never learn to cook. If you can’t cook, it argues, a man will simply drive you to a restaurant in his car and buy you dinner and treat you like a real powerful BITCH, whereas if you can whip up some spag bol then he will do something terrible like, I don’t know, have a nice relaxed evening putting the world to rights in your kitchen, and find himself feeling warm and happy in your company. Something awful like that.

The truth, my darling daughter, is that men don’t love bitches; they love women who are strong, and women who are lovely. Alright, so I have to admit that a number of men also love women who drink a litre of vodka and set fire to things, but that’s an evolutionary anomaly. (I’m not saying I was never that woman. I’m saying people can change.) Yes, you do need to stick up for yourself, yes it is fantastic to be taken out to dinner sometimes, and yes, you need to be able to tell someone where to stick it, should that need arise. Personally, I’m quite good at telling men where to stick it, in fact I’m probably better at that bit than the telling them I love them bit, which is a personality deficiency IN NO WAY HELPED BY READING THIS MORONIC BOOK. Just ask yourself: do YOU like people who say they can’t cook because they’re waiting for other people to take them to restaurants? Of course you don’t. So don’t try to become one. Even if you live in the tiniest flat with six other people, find a recipe book and turn it into a home. Who could resist someone, of any gender, who makes a house a home?

You see, this book comes from a terrible time called the 1990s when women were told that we had to flirt and fancy people according to The Rules, and those rules were frosty. We were told that Men Are From Mars And Women Are From Venus, and that He’s Just Not That Into You. These love manuals were sold to us as guidebooks to the human heart. In fact, they were guidebooks to life as a glacial sex machine (which sounds way more fun than it was), and we subsequently lost the ability to behave naturally at all. You should have tried having sex with us. (Well, no, you shouldn’t have, that would be weird) But I feel sorry for the men who did, flailing around in the throes of their animal experience, lost in intimacy, while we were just trying to remember the rule about smiling after 9pm on a Thursday.

2) 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy.

Jesus fucking Christ. It’s two people, right, a man and his son, and they walk down a bleak road for most of eternity because there’s been some kind of apocalypse so they’re homeless and nearly everyone’s dead or a savage and they’re trying to get to safety. Which they hope is further down the road. So they walk along it thinking dreadful thoughts, and that is the entire book. Daughter, know this: your mother is interested in wars, in what happens when the world changes, in life stripped to its bare bones, and also in the parent-child dialectic, as you may have observed. Your mother can be patient. Your mother loves Waiting For Godot, a play in which Godot never even fucking turns up. And yet The Road was still boring enough to make me long for the sweet release of slipping into a medically-induced coma.

I was in my 20s, alone in a cottage in Suffolk when I read it, and so I finished the whole thing in a day because it was that or kill myself, and at the end of the book I felt I might have have made the wrong choice. Did I mention that the dad in the book has a hacking cough that means he’s dying, and that that’s the best bit? Six hours reading time is a lot of life, my love, to spend on someone else’s enjoyment of despair. When you get six hours to yourself, put them to some beauty. And if you can’t do that, then pick flowers and put them on the table where you do things that are dull.

3) 'Sophie’s World' by Jostein Gaarder

I suppose that, with you not being called Sophie, and not being raised by a philosopher, you might not feel drawn to this in the same way I did. I suppose there won’t be a few years of your childhood where this is a global publishing sensation and everyone you meet says “Ooh like Sophie’s World!” instead of “Ooh like Sophie’s Choice!”and that you won’t feel it is your birthright to read this book. To summarise: all the way through it, a girl called Sophie receives some quite interesting information about the great philosophers, interspersed with sheer magic trickery stuff in the plot. And all the way through you’re going, “But HOW did that just happen? That’s amazing!” Well if you’re young and impressionable like I was. And at the very end the author just goes, “yeah, so that was all just magic.” There is no closure. No resolution. There is no need for me to even issue a spoiler alert there, because the book itself is spoiled. You will feel robbed.

See also 'The Life of Pi' for a similar sensation when you realise quite how much of your life you have invested in some talking animals on a fucking make-believe raft.

AND FINALLY. DEFINITELY, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES EVER, FOR AS LONG AS YOU LIVE, SHOULD YOU READ:

Any of the columns I wrote about you when you were a baby, especially that one in the Guardian about your bowel movements. The one that keeps winning online awards for the most Guardianesque piece of whimsical drivel ever to be published, and that got me written up in a well-known American magazine with the headline “Call off the search: we have found the worst journalist in the world.” You must understand that Mummy was very, very sleep-deprived when she wrote that one, and she needed the money. What am I talking about - you’ll never see it - I’m having the entire internet deleted before you can get to it. Mummy can make this happen, and if she can’t, Donald Trump will probably blow the whole thing up when he finally gets bored of the 140 character limit on Twitter. Or perhaps Russia will just nuke us all. Either of which would be preferable to you finding out that a national newspaper gave me a headline that claimed that I lived “in fear of the day my daughter’s turds get smaller.”

I love you. Goodnight.