Mommies Who Drink

Mommies Who Drink
Sex, drugs, and other distant memories: true tales of modern motherhood

Brett Paesel

1 November 2007 Paperback £6.99

‘It’s not Mommy Lit, or your standard-shelf ‘This is my Sex Life’ memoir. It’s Brett Paesel - a poet, a spy, an artist, a comedienne -- who happens to be a mommy with a sex life.

I love Brett’s laugh-out-loud writing and skewed perspective that always resonates with deep, complex, hilarious truth. She thinks like no other, and writes like someone we’ve all been waiting for."

Jill Soloway, writer and co-executive producer Six Feet Under

Join Brett Paesel and her friends at happy hour every Friday as they try to reconcile modern motherhood with their carefree pasts: planning to do cocaine again, only to discover that they don’t have a babysitter, or worse, the energy to put the evening together. Mommies Who Drink is a collection of true stories drawn from the author’s own experiences, and explores the common bond that either unites women in friendship or polarizes them in wildly opposing camps.

Sex and the City meets Desperate Housewives in this dark and wickedly hilarious account of modern motherhood. Paesel takes the reader through prenatal yoga classes with a celebrity guru, the purse party of a famous friend, and the dull playgroup where she fantasizes about graphic sex while the other mothers discuss their toddlers’ eating habits...

With a voice that’s real and poignant Paesel speaks to all women who are braving the new world of motherhood, where the secret question on their minds at the playground is, “what time of the day is too early to start drinking?”

As an actress in Hollywood , Brett Paesel lives a life that is at once unusual – she once appeared naked in an episode of HBO’s Six Feet Under – yet, like any parent, deeply ordinary. Paesel most recently appeared with Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, in Six Feet Under and in Gilmore Girls. She was also a regular cast member of Mr. Show with Bob and David on HBO and played Carol Brady in the long-running cult hit The Real Live Brady Bunch in Chicago and Off Broadway. Brett Paesel is a married mother of two and lives in Los Angeles . Her piercing wit and ability to see the humour in the everyday adventures of motherhood will appeal to all mothers and anyone that knows one.

‘If Rebecca Wells and Bukowski had a baby, and left her on Fran Leibowitz’s doorstep she might grow up to be

Mommies Who Drink is in development as a television series with HBO Independent Productions and Sex and the City executive producer Jenny Bicks.

Brett is available for readings, interviews and features. For further information please contact
Alex Richardson on 020 7911 8071 or Alexandra.Richardson@littlebrown.co.uk

‘Just when you worry there are no taboos left to explode, Brett Paesel redefines new motherhood with a book so painfully honest and funny, there should be a two-drink minimum. Mommies Who Drink is an R-rated book for women reluctant to enter a G-rated world.’
Cindy Chupack author of The Between Boyfriends Book and a writer/executive producer or HBO's Sex and the City

‘Brett Paesel is an amazing writer who has given us a true gift in Mommies Who Drink. I laughed at her, I laughed with her and I laughed at myself. I didn't want the book to end - it's that good.’
Cheryl Hines, actress, HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm

‘Brett's deeply touching, deeply hilarious autobiographical novel Mommies Who Drink will leave readers stumbling in the streets doubled over with laughter…This original, unfaltering new writer will surely find a well deserved booth in the back of the pantheon of contemporary literature.’
Moon Zappa, author America The Beautiful

’Brett's book is funny and silly and true. I mean, I'm not a mother, and to be honest I don't drink (it gives me a stomach ache), but I can tell you that that book is better than a giant bong hit. And I’m not even high right now. (But she is.)’
Sarah Silverman, comedienne/ writer, Jesus is Magic, The Sarah Silverman Show

‘What’s pleasurable about Paesel is her self-deprecating, sometimes raunchy wit and her non-judgmental attitude toward her peers…[a] must-read’ Elle magazine ( US edition)

No one is more surprised than Brett at her situation as a wife and mother of two boys living and working in Los Angeles , writing books and shows for TV. The daughter of American parents working in Germany and England , Brett’s family didn’t have a TV when she was young. She never saw The Brady Bunch or Welcome Back Kotter, or any of those programmes that send contemporaries into fits of laughter.

Possessing talent for very little else, Brett pursued a degree in Theatre and Drama at a small college in London , finishing up at Indiana University . She moved to New York to attend The Circle in the Square Professional Workshop where she learned how to build a character, cry on cue, throw her voice, and smoke a pack and a half of cigarettes per day.

She moved to Chicago because someone blew the whistle on her illegal sublet in Manhattan . In Chicago , she married an actor named Pat Towne, who liked physics and football. After a couple of years, she was cast in the tour of The Real Live Brady Bunch, which brought her back to New York for a year, where she could contemplate the irony of acting in a show that mimicked a show she’d never seen, in a city she had to leave to live in.

Acting in The Real Live Brady Bunch for three years turned out to affect everything that came after it. In San Francisco , she and Pat left the tour and developed a show called Not Without My Nipples: The Made for TV Musical. Nipples moved down to LA and was voted one of LA Reader’s worst shows of 1993. Brett and Pat had never intended on living in Los Angeles , but the show was fun so they stayed. A couple of years later, Brett joined the cast of Mr. Show with Bob and David on HBO for three seasons. She also did a couple of movies, and even developed shows for Comedy Central and Oxygen.

Then Spence was born. Having to care for a baby shifted everything and Brett started writing about it. She took a writing class with Claudette Sutherland and started reading her essays in Spoken Word venues like Sit n Spin and Uncaberet’s Say the Word. Then she started publishing her work in publications like Brain,child, Hip Mama, www.literarymama.com, www.freshyarn.com, and Violet Magazine (where she was also a contributing editor).

Brett has written three screenplays with writing partner Kerry Haynie: Little Death, Delirium, and Island . She acted in a couple of episodes of Six Feet Under. She did Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Gilmore Girls, which were all fun, but mostly she wanted to get back to writing. And she wanted a second child. Murphy was born in 2003. That same year, Brett collected her stories in the book, Mommies Who Drink, which was bought by her publisher and optioned by HBO.

She is currently writing a half-hour comedy for Touchstone and Fox, called Home Base. She is also writing a novel and also a collection of autobiographical stories called I Forgot to Cure Cancer, and Other Realizations of a Reluctant Grown-Up.

Brett volunteers at Spence’s kindergarten once a week, goes to writing class on Wednesdays, meets girlfriends for drinks on Fridays, and has started a killer cardio routine. She still can’t cook, sew, prioritize, or spell. She loves her husband, her boys, and her new couch. And even though her life looks nothing like what she planned on. She wakes up every day, grateful that everything went so horribly wrong.