Michael Ian Black

 

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Michael Ian Black is many things: actor, comedian, screenwriter, award-winning children’s book author, essayist, memoirist, podcaster. He is also a man, and the father of a boy on the cusp of manhood himself. In his poignant and insightful new book, A BETTER MAN: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to My Son (Publication Date: September 15, 2020; $24.95), Black offers a thoughtful and personal appraisal of the complicated meaning of masculinity in our times. Written in the form of a letter to his son as he gets ready to leave for college, this blend of memoir and advice, written with both weight and wit, challenges the outdated assumptions that society continues to impose upon boys about their place in the world. “Obviously, Michael Ian Black can be funny, but who knew he could write something so raw, intimate, and true?” says Peggy Orenstein, New York Times bestselling author of Boys & Sex. “A BETTER MAN cracked me wide open, and it’s a template for the conversation we need to be having with our boys.”

Raising an admirable son in the era of the Angry White Male, marked by school shootings and gun violence, #MeToo outrage, and wider acknowledgement of complex gender issues, is challenging, Black suggests. “Traditional masculinity encourages strength, independence, fortitude. All good qualities,” he writes. “At the same time, though, it provides no useful outlets for our vulnerability. If we cannot allow ourselves vulnerability, how are we supposed to experience wonder, fear, tenderness? If we cannot turn to others for help, what do we do with bewilderment and frustration? How do we even express something as elemental as joy?”

Black tackles these serious questions with characteristic humor and a respectful grace. As he writes to his son, Elijah, Black recalls the day the boy arrived in the world and the thicket of emotions that accompanied that arrival. He shares stories of his own complicated relationship with his father, who died when Michael was a child, and his upbringing in an often-contentious lesbian household. He recalls his own coming of age in a time when boys were routinely told to “act like a man,” with no direction on how to do so—or even what those words meant. Based on both personal experience and thoughtful observation of the rapid changes that are taking place in our society, he searches for the best way for his son—and all the boys of the rising generation—to navigate that change and become more evolved men than the vast majority of those who have come before. For today’s fathers he asks and seeks the answers to a difficult question: how can we be, and raise, better men?

“Thank you Michael Ian Black for challenging society's antiquated approach to raising boys, and deepening the conversation about what we actually want for our kids,” says Samantha Bee, host of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. I hope you will decide to prominently share this timely and heartfelt book with your audience this May. I will be in touch soon to discuss opportunities