Exploiting My Baby: Because It's Exploiting Me [Paperback]

"...A raw, often unsettling and always entertaining look at pregnancy and childbirth. Strasser flaunts her ability to worry about anything, her many documented imperfections and brings it all down to some seriously funny prose."
-Rick Kleffel, NPR

"If you read this book you will laugh until you're sick, I swear, but it's also very insightful."
-Dr. Phil

"Teresa Strasser cuts right through the mucus plug with Exploiting My Baby: Because It's Exploiting Me. With such chapter titles as 'Sitting Stretch Mark Shiva' and 'I'll Miss You, Toxins,' Strasser's funnier than your funniest friend and her neuroses are more acute than Joan Rivers' Having a Baby Can Be a Scream."
-LA Weekly

"I laughed my ass off - which is great, because now I don't have stretch marks anymore."
-New York Times-bestselling author Jenny McCarthy

"Exploiting her baby, perhaps, but most certainly rewarding her readers, Teresa Strasser trudges, nay, romps with us down the road from the anxiety of no baby to guilt of not deserving a precious child. All the while she reminds us that the echoes of our families of origin, although carried along with us like so much muck in a river-bed, need not choke our ability to flourish and find joy as parents."
-Dr. Drew Pinsky

"Hilarious first time memoir about motherhood."
-Life & Style

"Teresa's pain is your gain. The toll pregnancy and birth have taken on her marriage, career, psyche and cervix are all laid bare for your info-tainment. Her neurotic neonatal journey will make you laugh and cry. It might even make you aroused (if you're into that sort of thing)."
-Adam Carolla

"Exploiting My Baby: Because It's Exploiting Me is a hilarious, honest, often raunchy account of Strasser's pregnancy and delivery in which no subject is too sacred to broach: Porn, STDs, the fetal benefits of oral sex and a particularly disastrous clogged toilet scene all get their day. This is the stuff What to Expect When You're Expecting elegantly omits."
-The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles

"If Woody Allen was a woman with big giant ovaries and wrote a book about his pregnancy, it still wouldn't have been this funny, warm, brassy and insightful."
-Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, bestselling author of Sippy Cups are Not for Chardonnay

"Strasser's collection of essays is a comic, poignant and no-holds-barred revelation of her anxiety-strewn road to motherhood."
-Laguna Beach Independent

"If this is what it's really like to have a baby, I should have been a lot nicer to my lovely wife. Also, she should have made me laugh this much. So we're even. If you think you worry too much about being a parent, Teresa Strasser will inform you of all the things you forgot to freak out about."
-Joel Stein

"I loved this book. Teresa Strasser has blessed us all with an amazing, inspired work. I laughed, I cried, I learned lessons about marriage and love and pregnancy and motherhood that will last a lifetime. Teresa knows how to speak directly to every one of us, and offers us the inside story every pregnant woman wishes someone out there would finally share. Her very personal, hysterical and moving story is universal. I can't wait to buy this book for all my pregnant friends."
-Rabbi Naomi Levy, author of Hope Will Find You and To Begin Again

"Darn funny and a truthful glimpse into the realities of pregnancy."
-L.A. Parent Magazine

"Teresa is the mom you want to invite to your playgroup."
-Heather McDonald, New York Times bestselling author of You'll Never Blueball in this Town Again

Teresa Strasser made her baby a spleen and some eyebrows.
He got her a book deal.

Everyone loves babies-and pregnant women-so TV and radio personality Teresa Strasser decided to use this obsession to her advantage. She came up with a way to provide for her newfound family and help other mommies- to-be with this down- and-dirty memoir about first-time pregnancy.

An award-winning writer, Teresa is achingly honest about the motherhood she begins experiencing at age thirty-eight. With a biting sense of humor and heart, she portrays the tribulations that come with each trimester, from nausea, weight gain, and bladder infections to dealing with those other kinds of pregnant women. (You know the ones. The ones who glow-and gloat about it.)

Exploiting My Baby is a must-read for anyone pregnant, trying to get pregnant, or who is just more crazy than baby-crazy. Hopping on a trail pioneered by such lions as Laura Ingalls Wilder, Erma Bombeck, and Tori Spelling, Teresa has no problem using her pregnancy, childbirth and difficult relationship with her own mother for material. It's her blunt and plain-spoken approach to exploiting her family for literary success that sets her apart.