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1981 Leacock Medal - Take My Family- Gary Lautens


"I felt a sensation in my chest and a tightening throat after reading the 1981 Leacock Medal winner Take My Family ... Please! by Gary Lautens." 

Because the author was a newspaper columnist, I assumed the book would be a collection of well written essays, and it is.  But more than that, the stories work together as a chest-warming, throat-grabbing record of a man’s love for his children.

 Lautens never uses the word “love” in this way, and more often he grumbles about the diaper-pail misery that small children rain down upon their parents. His affection glows out of his description of the frustrations, anxieties, and befuddlements that are a function of just caring so much for his kids.

Lautens was a master of domestic humour, a genre that Will Ferguson said, in The Penguin Anthology of Canadian Humour, seems easy, but is painfully difficult.
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