Nell Frizzell is a master. I particularly recommend this book to men… it is a visceral exploration of one young woman’s life that has immediately applicable lessons for us all. Vital reading. The Panic Years is also fun, funny, and warm. I love it dearly!’ Transworld has bagged a “witty, reassuring and radically ambitious” memoir from The Panic Years author and Vogue columnist Nell Frizzell. Raw, hilarious and beguilingly honest, Nell Frizzell's account of her panic years is both an arm around the shoulder and a campaign to start a conversation. This affects us all - women, men, mothers, children, partners, friends, colleagues - so it's time we started talking about it with a little more candour. Timely, honest, brave and funny calling for a new kind of conversation about love, work, and parentood' - the Daily Mail The publisher described the work as “a memoir culminating in a manifesto”. It said: “ Holding the Baby sets out to understand why we still treat early parenthood as an individual slog rather than a shared cultural responsibility. Tracing her own journey to the nadir of sleeplessness via social retreat and murderous rage, Frizzell draws on the latest research to explore the ways in which we fail new parents, and offer a rallying crying that we fight for a better alternative.”

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Giving parents a break doesn’t just mean doing a bit of yoga and lying on the sofa and ignoring the piles in the sink. True, genuine release from the stress of raising small children means shared and equal parenting in whatever shape your family happens to be. It means mandatory paid parental leave. It means a child-friendly workplace culture. It means a functioning welfare state funded by taxation. It means safe and high-quality housing for everyone. It means accessible, subsidised childcare that pays its staff a living wage. It means access to green space and affordable healthy food and good public transport and mental health care and playgroups and children’s centres. It means funding and supporting the National Health Service. It means park benches and playgrounds and fully-funded schools and honest conversations with your peers.Over the course of more than 130 columns, British Vogue’ s parenting columnist Nell Frizzell has analyzed and dissected the highs and lows of motherhood—interweaving deeply personal reflections on raising her son with calls for greater support for parents across the board. In her new book, Holding the Baby , she distills everything she’s learned into a moving memoir and manifesto for change. Here, she reflects on her greatest revelations from five years as a mother. Frizzell writes beautifully and poetically … while reassuring and validating the reader’s concerns with hilarious and comforting anecdotes from her own panic years. This is an important read for all women’ - the Independent Frizzell’s compassionate, compulsive prose fizzes with imaginative humour and metaphor... I admire Frizzell’s bravery, candour and campaigning spirit. Her critique of a society where inadequate, outdated government policy and workplace culture perpetuate gender inequality is sure to spark crucial conversations.- the Evening Standard

Read everything that Nell writes! We continuously mention her work on the High Low because she really is such a unique writer/ - The High Low Podcast Heartening, eye-opening, hilarious. I'm glad Nell has given this weird time a term we can all use'. - Emma Gannon In these essays we see the Pond from the perspectives of writers who have swum there. Esther Freud describes the life-affirming sensation of swimming through the seasons; Lou Stoppard pays tribute to the winter swimmers who break the ice; Margaret Drabble reflects on the golden Hampstead days of her youth; Sharlene Teo visits for the first time; and Nell Frizzell shares the view from her yellow lifeguard’s canoe. The Panic Years made me laugh and it made me cry. There’s a rare tenderness to this book that comes from not having felt seen before. It’s for our generation, and Nell gets it. She understands and respects us'. - Rhiannon Cosslett Honest, unflinching and necessary - alleviates parental guilt and might even encourage you to forgive your own!' Sara PascoeNell Frizzell’s thoughts on womanhood and motherhood are as informative as they are poetic. Writing that challenges and enlightens you just as much as it entertains and stimulates you is rare, this book confidently does both on an important and complicated topic for modern women' - Dolly Alderton But how to stay sane in such a maddening time? How to know who you are and what you might want from life? How to know if you're making the right decisions? There is so much about womanhood that feels indefinable. And yet with her definitions of the flux, and the panic years, Nell manages to define the indefinable - as well as uniting childfree women and mothers, where the two are so often pitted against one another. Lyrical, moving and thorough, this is a memoir, a feminist text and a piece of social commentary. Every millennial woman should have it on her bookshelf'. - Pandora Sykes A memoir culminating in a manifesto, Holding the Baby sets out to understand why we still treat early parenthood as an individual slog rather than a shared cultural responsibility. Tracing her own journey to the nadir of sleeplessness via social retreat and murderous rage, Frizzell draws on the latest research to explore:

My favourite person on the politics of parenthood. Read it and feel comforted, cheered and galvanized (even when your brain and body are melting).' Pandora Sykes I don’t know a single woman my age who hasn’t experienced the phenomenon that Nell articulates so bloody perfectly. Her writing is funny and beautiful and smart and I can’t tell you how necessary this book is!’ A fresh, funny novel filled with truths about relationships and perfect details. I tore though it.’ - Amy Liptrot The history of ‘lazy parenting’• Since the 90s, helicopter parenting has been used to describe adults who hover near their children, ever-ready to move obstacles and smooth the path ahead (in the early 00s, universities in the USA said these parents were unable to stop hovering even once their kids had left home – calling them to wake them up for lectures, for example). I’ve not been a single parent, a dating parent, a parent in a new relationship or in an open relationship. What I know is that being in a relationship with the other parent of your child means years – no, a lifetime – of conflict and compromise. You will, inevitably, have different approaches. One of you thinks you should let the baby crawl down the aisle of a Great Western carriage while the other thinks it’s dirty; one of you likes co-sleeping and the other doesn’t; one of you thinks you should just clear up in the evening, the other as you go along; one of you wants to be held as you fall asleep, one of you needs to have nothing and nobody on their skin just for an hour. You might disagree on whether you want more babies, or when. You might disagree on childcare, on money, on feeding, on what bib, on Calpol, on Hey Duggee. One of you will be more tired than the other but at different times. One of you will use naps to clean the hobs while the other uses them to lie down. Try to separate your parenting life from your relationship, even if that just means taking 70 seconds out of your day to look them in the eye. And don’t make your child a mediator or a weapon in those fights. You might not smell “that baby smell”

There is a period of time during which a baby is utterly physically reliant on its parent or caregiver for survival. Some people call it the fourth trimester. Others call it a slice of pure hell. But of course, this period is not a trimester; it does not just last only three months. And it could be so much better...' What I’m not so good at – and what I think is a big ask of new parents – is then pretending on top of all that to be completely chilled out. To pretend not to care when your house looks like the inside of a compost bin, when your toddler snatches a paintbrush off another child and starts to chew it, when the person you are meeting texts to say they’re running 15 minutes late so you have to entertain a small child in the street for quarter of an hour, when they get a rash, when the bus stop’s closed, when your child won’t eat or you run out of clean nappies. All that stuff is, to some degree at least, stressful. Acting like you don’t care, haven’t noticed or don’t mind, feels like just another layer of artifice to add onto the sediments of bullshit new parents have to deal with. Scatter it over most stains, most fluids, most leaks, explosions, and oozes, let it soak in, and then wash it off. As I say to all and any new parents: baking soda is great on piss and vomit. And you’re going to have lots of both. Children’s centers are the most beautiful places on earth Lively, informative… Nell uses her own experience generously and the effect is inclusive, reassuring and funny, She articulates feelings I’ve had but never quite explored – it’s excellent' - Amy Liptrot