Adam Mansbach politely asks you to go to sleep

(image courtesy of Akashic Books)

A while back, Overheard Newsroom tweeted this gem: "You can start a story with a quote twice in your career. Once when you're an intern, and again if the pope ever says f---."

Adam Mansbach does say "f---" a lot, but he isn't the pope - therefore, it took all my willpower not to start this post with this absolutely perfect line from his new book:

"The wind whispers soft through the grass, hon / The field mice, they make not a peep / It's been thirty-eight minutes already / Jesus Christ, what the f---? Go to sleep."

If you haven't closed down your browser window in disgust by now, you may be the perfect audience for "Go the F--- to Sleep," Mansbach's new children's book - er, make that children's book for adults. ONLY. Seriously, this is R-rated stuff.

The book is basically exactly what it sounds like: A whimsically illustrated, liltingly rhymed parental plea for their young child to stop asking for water, quit with the questions and please just go the f--- to sleep already.

Mansbach, who is Jewish, lives in Berkeley and is the author of several books, including "The End of the Jews" and "Angry Black White Boy." The genesis of "Go the F--- to Sleep" (or GTFTS, as it's been dubbed on the Internet), as Mansbach explains it, was a joking Facebook status he posted about writing a book with that title, after yet another difficult time getting his now-3-year-old daughter, Vivien, to sleep.

Adam Mansbach (photo by Sarah Millet)

Because GTFTS is done in the style of a children's book, it had to be illustrated - and Mansbach immediately thought of his friend Ricardo Cortes, an author and illustrator who had once made his own children's book - "It's Just a Plant," about a little girl who discovers her parents smoking pot.

Mansbach and Cortes worked together to conceptualize the art, which features pajama-clad children in a variety of fantastical and strange situations (hugging a pride of sleeping lions, parachuting into a farmer's field, playing bongos next to a mountain range) as well as normal domestic scenes of a child in their crib, finally asleep in bed, etc.

While his previous books have been released by big publishing houses, Mansbach approached small Brooklyn-based Akashic Books about publishing GTFTS. "I love the work they do at the house, and I love the idea of working with independent publishers if I can," he says.

What Akashic didn't realize was how big a hit the book would be.

A viral marketing snafu got people talking: Somehow, a PDF of the book got leaked online, and soon it was being posted everywhere. At first, Mansbach and Akashic tried to limit the damage by sending cease-and-desist notices and just politely asking people to remove the link; eventually, though, they realized that the exposure was helping turn GTFTS into a license to print money.

A month before its release, the book was already at No. 1 on Amazon's best-seller list, and it topped the New York Times list on its first week in print. (As of today, it's No. 4 on the Amazon Top 100.)

Despite Akashic's small size, Mansbach assures me that "they've been completely on top of it. They're a small publisher, but they have great distribution."

But the book has attracted the attention of more than just the sleep-deprived guardians of toddlers. In a move that made hipster parents across the country have apoplexies with delight, Samuel L. Jackson recorded an audiobook of GTFTS. And Fox 2000 has bought the movie rights.

Um, movie rights?

Mansbach isn't allowed to say much, except that he's not going to have anything to do with the screenplay, but will gladly go to the premiere. A writer-director has been hired and "it's a very open adaptation," he explains. He can reveal that it will be a live-action feature intended for adults (as if there were any question).

(image courtesy of Akashic Books)

Some have argued that Mansbach is able to "get away" with his profane book because he's a dad - that a woman, a mother, wouldn't be able to admit these feelings publicly without being lambasted for being a "bad mom."

"There's some validity to that," Mansbach acknowledges. "It's more permissible, societally, for a father to express frustration in these kinds of ways. That's partly related to the genderization of humor and frustration and anger, but part of it is also the fact that it's still fairly unusual for people to consider that a man is taking primary care of a kid, or that he's in charge of putting a kid to bed. In that way, the book gives a little more visibility to fathers."

Mansbach has long prided himself on being outside the mainstream - he's a white Jew who loves hip-hop, for one - and none of his previous books have enjoyed as much insta-success as GTFTS. Yet Mansbach insists this isn't his "sellout moment."

"There was nothing calculated or intentional about this book," he says. "I wrote it whimsically and super quickly, but honestly, and with some attempt at craft. People who know me are sort of tickled by how it blew up because it's clear to them that this is me talking the same kind of s--- I'm always talking about, it just happened to hit a vein in the zeitgeist right now."

That vein, he explains, is "a kind of honesty about parenting that has been sort of shut down by everyone's desire to appear to be a perfect parent…There's a constant conversation on any number of fronts about parenting, but people don't feel at liberty to admit the frustrations. It's hard to embody paradoxes and complexities."

Vivien is a better sleeper now than she was when Mansbach wrote the book, though she still has difficult nights. Yet one of Mansbach's lessons from GTFTS is that his experiences weren't as bad as they could have been. "I've heard a lot of stories," he says, somewhat wearily, when I ask him if parents who have read the book have enlightened him with their own tales of going-to-bed-woe.

"But I realized," he says after a moment, "that my daughter in many ways was relatively easy to deal with."

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