What happens when a “hard-core, hard-drinking bachelor in the Charles Bukowski mould” falls in love, starts a family, and decides to stay home with his newborn son? If he’s David Eddie, author of the fabulous and distressingly underappreciated Chump Change, he turns his wit and finely-honed observational skills on househusbanding, and, most importantly, on himself. In a society where most of the books on parenting are texts written either by or for women, Housebroken is a refreshing, utterly hilarious and often moving portrait of parenting and masculinity at the dawn of a new millennium.

Housebroken steers clear of the child-focused, emotive writing of Anne Lamott and Louise Erdrich, presenting instead a clear-eyed overview of Eddie’s life in the year following his wife’s return to work after the birth of their son Nicholas. Eddie is a fearless writer, frankly documenting (and occasionally seeming to revel in) his admitted inability to hold a “real” job, the post-birth rough patches in his marriage, his misspent youth, and the fathering techniques he fears will forever brand him a “bad dad,” with a sureness of tone and an arch, self-effacing, self-aware sense of humour.

Far-reaching and casually erudite, Eddie is as comfortable writing about classic Italian cooking (“at heart a housewife’s cuisine”) as he is mercilessly skewering Hollywood’s notion of masculinity and the pretensions of the culture and people around him.

I can’t vouch that being a father has made Eddie a better person (although he seems to think so, and all of the evidence here seems to support him); it has, unquestionably, made him a better writer. In addition to the sharp humour, there is a tenderness and warmth here that was lacking in Chump Change, contributing a depth and maturity to his voice that bodes well for his future writing. “The child is the father to the man” indeed.