Upsetting Day: Listen to My Heart: Lessons in Love, Laughter, and Lunacy (Patreon)

In 1995, Kathie Lee Gifford published a book with her 4-year-old son Cody about far less than nothing. Make no attempt to find meaning in this directionless collection of uninteresting anecdotes. Listen to My Heart: Lessons in Love, Laughter, and Lunacy is the scar left on your brain after Kathie Lee Gifford corners you at a baby shower. It is the haunting scream of a microscopic civilization that formed and fell in the bacteria of Cody Gifford's training potty. It is the oblivion of meaning, dressed up as a mother's love.

This is going to sound obvious, but it's hard to be objective when it comes to your own kid. Everything they do is the cutest, and every one of their achievements is far beyond those of less special children. If you sat down to write a book about things your kid did, you'd need incredible self-awareness to recognize which ones held secret wisdom and which ones were simply a dumb baby not knowing shit. Kathie Lee Gifford does not have incredible self-awareness. Kathie Lee Gifford thinks it's wine o'clock somewhere and doesn't want you to get her started on pasta salad ideas. Her adventures with Cody are so uneventful and meaningless I'm 80% sure this book was written by a publicist who had never met him.

Kathie Lee and Cody open their book with a weird dedication. Normally authors use this space to thank someone in their life or honor their heroes. It's generally not used for this, a random shoutout to sad, destitute babies. This is a collection of dull "my kid said this" stories, and Kathie Lee is like, "Before we launch into this, I want everyone to remember that nonspecific baby sadness exists. A lot of kids will die while you're reading it." It's fucking madness. It's like putting the word AIDS on the front of a Garfield Valentine.

Kathie Lee writes her own foreword, and starts with a good point. This book is, at best, the most ordinary background noise buzzing through a pedestrian mind. If you said "YOU. SHOULD. WRITE. A BOOK!" after a lady told the story of why she fired her acupuncturist, Listen to My Heart: Lessons in Love, Laughter, and Lunacy would instantly form in her head. These are generic mom sounds, and it's sort of amazing how Kathie Lee knows. But wait! It's a trick!

Less than half a page later, Kathie Lee has gone from "literally anyone is capable of this" to "these insipid stories about my special boy MIGHT SAVE YOUR LIFE." This won't surprise you, but there are no Cody stories in this book with any life-saving elements, even in the broadest sense. I'm not saying Kathie Lee Gifford knows nothing about raising children, but I am saying you can't know less than her. If you crawled dripping from a star egg and found a human baby, you would gain nothing from this book. The person who scribbled "NOT FOOD" on that baby is both more helpful, and a better writer.

Kathie Lee begins most sections with a reminder that she has no capacity to self-edit and no idea what a book like this should even look like. As a wealthy TV personality married to an NFL legend, she's just a normal parent like you. And like you, she doesn't know which stories are relatable, and which ones demonstrate how nude, naked children are the expression of God's sexual creativity:

Kathie Lee Gifford actually said the words "I never know how much to share about my children" and then shared 400 words about the gift of her nude boy. The story, in its entirety, was how her son was naked, liked being naked, and screamed that he was naked. And she wrapped it all up by saying she hopes he will one day fuck. You might assure yourself this is all normal and kids get naked all the time, but do you know what most parents do when their children have no clothes on? Not bring up their future sex life. And what's all that shit about God? This isn't oversharing-- these are the incoherent last words of someone beaten to death by a priest's dildo.

This is a perfect example of how judgment can be corrupted by the unconditional love of a mother. This story fucking sucks. A woman and a toddler are listing things you shouldn't sit on with no theme or escalation. They are simply opening their mouths and letting fleeting thoughts fall out. There is no reason to ever share this story with another person, much less type it out. If I had this bathtub conversation with my daughter I would blast the cold shower and say, "If you tell anyone we had an interaction this joyless and empty I will call you a liar." The fact that Kathie Lee GIfford even bothered to remember this unremarkable, barely related list of words suggests how few stories she and Cody must share. Sorry, maybe this woman with 288 IMDB credits, 17 books, and 16 albums who drove from Greenwich to Manhattan every day to film a live show had plenty of time to spend with her kid, but you don't break out the "one time my kid sort of fucked up a conversation" story if you're sitting on a giant collection of anecdotes.

Oh, Jesus. I was kidding about how she never got to see her kid, but I might have accidentally been right. This Lesson in Love, Laughter, and Lunacy is about how she wrote little notes to her two-year-old to let him know she knows she's not there for breakfast. What does he do with that? Heartfelt or not, this is such substance-free sadness. If you whispered this to E.T., he would dry up and die. Not to mention Cody is two here, and even by the most generous accounts not a genius, so he couldn't read these little notes. Who would tell this story? "Hi, readers. Motherhood is a gift, like the nude body, and as a mother, an au pair reminded my boy every morning that I was aware of our separate breakfasts. The end, I'm done with my laughter lesson." Fuck. Maybe dedicating her book to loveless, hopeless babies in general was Kathie Lee Gifford's way of preparing us for the crushing despair of her Cody stories.

Another thing parents can't properly judge is how fascinating their child's curiosity will be to others. Our children ask questions that seem philosophical to us because an idle thought might require us to suddenly paint a picture of the entire universe. So I get how Cody asking his mom about Keith Richards' monster face seemed like a profound, teachable moment to her. On the other hand, what a couple of stupid assholes. You might run into those guys at work, Kathie Lee. Which means you, more than the average person, should be able to picture how very not interesting it would be to ask The Rolling Stones, "Do your horrible faces betray dark and evil hearts? We'll start with you, Mick."

I think Kathie Lee Gifford's most relatable trait is how she can't discuss naked kids at length without making it weird.

This anecdote isn't really centered around Cody and look at how different it is. Kathie Lee complains about actual shared experiences! There are story beats, sincere self-deprecation, a twist, and then she ends it with two different zingers. This is why she's a television icon-- this is a charming woman telling a cute story, and it demonstrates how the limitless affection parents have for their kids fuck up their sensibilities. Speaking of, you guys, my daughter burst into my office to ask what funny book I was writing about and I said, "Listen to my fart." Oh, boy, here we go. Deck the halls!

Kathie Lee and Cody have trouble getting on the same page. In this story he gently wonders what happens when you die and she takes the opportunity to explain the majesty of the Christian afterlife. "Whatever, Power Rangers," he decides. I guess this is just another "Kathie Lee said a dumb thing and then Cody said a dumb thing" story, so maybe I'm also losing my perspective on what's interesting? Hang on, there's got to be at least one good Cody adventure in this garbage book.

Whoa, this is the one. Kathie Lee's kid had a diarrhea rampage in front of a United States President? In her... her "cowboy room?" For the first time in Listen to My Heart, it's like I'm not sitting next to the squarest grandmother at a wedding reception. She should have called this book The Time Cody Farted on President Ford and Then Shit His Pants and made it three pages long.

Aside from the thirty minute crap he took in front of the President and First Lady, Cody never does anything cool, so some stories are just Kathie Lee watching her kids and imagining what it would be like if they died. I don't have a joke about that. Who would? I only want to point it out so you don't blame Cody for what comes next. Kathie Lee taught him to be like this:

If your child pats you and says, "I'll get another Mommy," you don't giggle and put it in your book. You throw whatever kid said that back into the corn maze where you found it. Spriggan ass little shit. We'll talk about this again when the harvest moon is red, "Cody."

Anyway, the rest of the Listen to My Heart is Cody being naked and threatening to kill his mother:

Every single quote from Cody is the exact thing a talking doll would say right before a knife flashed across your neck. "That's okay, Mom," he tells the lifeless parts of this latest Kathie Lee. "I'll get another Mommy."

Wait, oh no, is this what Kathie Lee meant when she said this book could save lives? Was Listen to My Heart: Lessons in Love, Laughter, and Lunacy her attempt to warn us about Cody? I'm sorry, Kathie Lee! And Kathie Lees II through LXXIV! I didn't realize until 27 years too late!

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