Part memoir, part research on how to raise boys today

When Ruth Whippman decided to thaw one final embryo, she was 42 years old. She and her husband had two sons - Solly, then six, and Zephy, three. Their remaining embryos all had XY chromosomes too.

As her pregnancy became visible, most people assumed she was trying for a girl. When she told them she was having a boy, people treated her "as this object of pity", Whippman, a British-American writer, said in a recent interview from her home in Berkeley, California.

"There was this real sense that boys were somehow disappointing." It was 2017. Whippman, a selfdescribed liberal feminist, was watching the #MeToo movement explode all around her. She felt as if men had become the enemy, which made bringing another one into the world a different kind of challenge from what she already faced at home with two rumbustious little boys.

But she was conflicted. "While the feminist part of me yelled, 'Smash the patriarchy', the mother part of me wanted to wrap the patriarchy up in its blankie and read it a story," she writes in her new book, BoyMom.

The title of the book borrows from the social media phenomenon known as #BoyMom, a hashtag that has become a full-blown trend in recent months.

Online, #BoyMom can be a badge of honour awarded for simply surviving the amped-up high jinks of tumbling boy-tots. Or it can be a tragedy, centring on the inevitable "break-up" that must occur between mothers and sons.

It can also be a send-up of itself, a parody of the "toxic boy mum" who is dangerously, proudly enmeshed with her son.

Whippman's book is not primarily about these memes. Part memoir - she is the "boy mum" in the title part reportage, the book hopes to give parents, including fathers, tools and information about raising boys today.

Whippman, now 50, is hardly the first person to write about boys as if they need their own operating manual. Michael Thompson's It's A Boy! and How To Raise A Boy by Michael Reichert have become classics of the genre.