Tim Dowling – författare

The much-loved Guardian columnist asks what it takes to make a husband, and looks to his own married life to provide the answer.**Anything resembling advice should be taken at reader’s own risk.You’ll never get divorced if you never get married. Not even your granny minds if you live in sin anymore. And if you’re single you can choose curtains without somebody else butting in. So why bother with marriage? It can’t just be an easy way round having to buy your own deodorant.Guardian columnist Tim Dowling is a husband of some twenty years. His marriage is resounding proof that even the most impossible partnership can work out for the best. Some of the time.So while this book is called `How To be a Husband’, it’s not really a how-to guide at all. Nor is it a compendium of petty remarks and brinkmanship – although it contains plenty of both. You may pick up a few DIY hints. You might learn that while marriage is founded on love, it endures through bloody hard work. Most likely it will make you whimper with the laughter of painful recognition.`How To be a Husband’ is a cautionary tale about throwing caution to the wind. It’s the strange romance of two people consenting to share a roll-on. It’s a new manifesto for marriage and an answer to why, even when we suck at it, we stick at it.

The much-loved Guardian columnist asks what it takes to make a husband, and looks to his own married life to provide the answer.**Anything resembling advice should be taken at reader’s own risk.You’ll never get divorced if you never get married. Not even your granny minds if you live in sin anymore. And if you’re single you can choose curtains without somebody else butting in. So why bother with marriage? It can’t just be an easy way round having to buy your own deodorant.Guardian columnist Tim Dowling is a husband of some twenty years. His marriage is resounding proof that even the most impossible partnership can work out for the best. Some of the time.So while this book is called ‘How To be a Husband’, it’s not really a how-to guide at all. Nor is it a compendium of petty remarks and brinkmanship – although it contains plenty of both. You may pick up a few DIY hints. You might learn that while marriage is founded on love, it endures through bloody hard work. Most likely it will make you whimper with the laughter of painful recognition.‘How To be a Husband’ is a cautionary tale about throwing caution to the wind. It’s the strange romance of two people consenting to share a roll-on. It’s a new manifesto for marriage and an answer to why, even when we suck at it, we stick at it.

Written with self-excoriating candour and the driest humour, comes a book about being a dad from one of our best loved journalists.“For me the hardest task of fatherhood was always the oppressive obligation to lead by example. My sons have been present on countless occasions when I have, as we say in my homeland, completely lost my shit. During these stressful moments I have often wished to turn to them as a judge might to a jury and say, “Please strike the next few minutes from the record”, but many of those instances are chronicled in these pages. It’s not because I’m any less ashamed now; it’s because if I left them out there wouldn’t be enough for a book.Perhaps this is my life’s true purpose: maybe I’m here to teach my sons that self-esteem comes and goes – it can get rolled right out of you at short notice – but that you still can get by in life without any, as long as you don’t want to be a contestant on The Apprentice. That, at least, is my experience. And for what it’s worth, my example.”

The much-loved Guardian columnist asks what it takes to make a husband, and looks to his own married life to provide the answer.**Anything resembling advice should be taken at reader’s own risk.You’ll never get divorced if you never get married. Not even your granny minds if you live in sin anymore. And if you’re single you can choose curtains without somebody else butting in. So why bother with marriage? It can’t just be an easy way round having to buy your own deodorant.Guardian columnist Tim Dowling is a husband of some twenty years. His marriage is resounding proof that even the most impossible partnership can work out for the best. Some of the time.So while this book is called ‘How To be a Husband’, it’s not really a how-to guide at all. Nor is it a compendium of petty remarks and brinkmanship – although it contains plenty of both. You may pick up a few DIY hints. You might learn that while marriage is founded on love, it endures through bloody hard work. Most likely it will make you whimper with the laughter of painful recognition.‘How To be a Husband’ is a cautionary tale about throwing caution to the wind. It’s the strange romance of two people consenting to share a roll-on. It’s a new manifesto for marriage and an answer to why, even when we suck at it, we stick at it.

Written with self-excoriating candour and the driest humour, comes a book about being a dad from one of our best loved journalists.“For me the hardest task of fatherhood was always the oppressive obligation to lead by example. My sons have been present on countless occasions when I have, as we say in my homeland, completely lost my shit. During these stressful moments I have often wished to turn to them as a judge might to a jury and say, “Please strike the next few minutes from the record”, but many of those instances are chronicled in these pages. It’s not because I’m any less ashamed now; it’s because if I left them out there wouldn’t be enough for a book.Perhaps this is my life’s true purpose: maybe I’m here to teach my sons that self-esteem comes and goes – it can get rolled right out of you at short notice – but that you still can get by in life without any, as long as you don’t want to be a contestant on The Apprentice. That, at least, is my experience. And for what it’s worth, my example.”

Giles Wareing has started telling people he’s forty, even though he’s actually thirty-nine years and eleven months. It’s supposed to help him conquer the fear, but in fact he has only given the fear a four-week head start. Giles is a freelance writer of amusing articles for a national newspaper. One day, feeling particularly fortyish, he happens to type ‘Giles Wareing+unfunny’ into a search engine. And that’s when he discovers the thread. The thread is called ‘The Giles Wareing Haters’ Club’, and is entirely devoted to holding everything he has ever written up to excoriating criticism and ridicule.As Giles becomes obsessed with the thread, with tracking down its participants, his angst begins to focus on one particularly scornful contributor, and it soon becomes clear that things are going really quite badly wrong . . .A tragedy, a farce and a detective story, The Giles Wareing Haters’ Club is an absorbing, hilarious and razor-sharp look at the modern male in all his dysfunctional glory.‘Entertaining and unexpectedly poignant’ Times Literary Supplement‘Very funny . . .Cringe comedy at its best’ GQ‘An acerbically dry and hilarious tale’ InStyle

While this book is indeed titled How to Be a Husband, please do not mistake it for a self-help book. Tim Dowling—columnist for The Guardian, husband, father of three, a person who once got into a shark tank for money—does not purport to have any pearls of wisdom about wedded life. What he does have is more than twenty years of marriage experience, and plenty of hilarious advice for what not to do in almost every conjugal situation.             With the sharp wit that has made his Guardian columns a weekly must-read, Dowling explores what it means to be a good husband in the twenty-first century. The bar has been raised dramatically in the last hundred years: back in the day, every time you went out for cigarettes, it was simply expected that you came back. Now, every time you’re sent out for espresso pods and tampons, it is expected that you come back with the right sort. And being a father doesn’t seem to command much innate respect these days, either. When his first child was born, Dowling imagined himself eliciting a natural awe as the distant, authoritative figurehead; he did not anticipate his children hijacking his Twitter account to post heartfelt admissions of loserdom like “Hi, I suck at everything I try in life.”             Still, two decades of wedded bliss is nothing to sneeze at, particularly from a couple who agreed to get married with the resigned determination of two people plotting to bury a body in the woods. How to Be a Husband is a wickedly funny guide to surviving the era of “The End of Men” (hint: it involves DIY), and an unexpectedly poignant memoir about love, marriage, and staying together until death doth you part.From the Hardcover edition.

Giles Wareing has started telling people he’s forty, even though he’s actually thirty-nine years and eleven months. It’s supposed to help him conquer the fear, but in fact he has only given the fear a four-week head start. Giles is a freelance writer of amusing articles for a national newspaper. One day, feeling particularly fortyish, he happens to type ‘Giles Wareing+unfunny’ into a search engine. And that’s when he discovers the thread. The thread is called ‘The Giles Wareing Haters’ Club’, and is entirely devoted to holding everything he has ever written up to excoriating criticism and ridicule.As Giles becomes obsessed with the thread, with tracking down its participants, his angst begins to focus on one particularly scornful contributor, and it soon becomes clear that things are going really quite badly wrong . . .A tragedy, a farce and a detective story, The Giles Wareing Haters’ Club is an absorbing, hilarious and razor-sharp look at the modern male in all his dysfunctional glory.‘Entertaining and unexpectedly poignant’ Times Literary Supplement‘Very funny . . .Cringe comedy at its best’ GQ‘An acerbically dry and hilarious tale’ InStyle

Written with self-excoriating candour and the driest humour, comes a book about being a dad from one of our best loved journalists. For Tim Dowling, fatherhood has sometimes felt like two decades of lessons learned through failure.1. Don’t give your children sugary drinks and expect them to be as sweet. You could end up with a chopstick in your earhole.2. There is no reason holidays should be thought of as relaxing. Consider them an opportunity to be shrieked at in different climates.3. ‘Let’s not tell mum about this’ is not legally binding. It never has been. You’re only trying to make yourself feel better.Drawing on what actually feels like two lifetimes of experience, Dad You Suck is a hilarious account of the joy of fatherhood, and the subtle art of transforming your children’s insults into a reason for being.