By Ellen Garnett
Contributing Writer

The moment I saw “I is a good writer” on the back cover of “Dad is Fat” by comedian Jim Gaffigan, I knew I had to buy his new book.
As someone who people deem a clean and family-fun comedian, Gaffigan explains through mini-essays about the family shenanigans he, his wife and their five kids get into while living in their two-bedroom New York apartment.
Unlike other authors, who slap their readers in the face with advice about how to raise their children, Gaffigan blatantly admits that he really doesn’t know what’s going on most of the time as a father.
This highlights a dilemma for all fathers: achieving a healthy degree of physical and emotional involvement with their children while in competition with their children’s mother (aka the Julia Roberts of the room) and dad remains the creepy version of Jack Nicholson from Anger Management (but let’s get real, Jack Nicholson has always been weird).
What seems to be the most appealing about Gaffigan’s book, as well as his standup, is his honesty. Gaffigan embraces his role as a fat, lazy American who is not afraid to pledge his allegiance to McDonald’s, even when other people try to hide that guilty pleasure. It’s easy to have an intellectual crush on Gaffigan because of the way he constructs his thoughts within his essays (in which he consistently remembers to thank his wife Jeannie for assisting him in writing the book). He structures his essays in much the same way as he does his standup, a seemingly jumpy dialogue, but it’s still linear thought.  He provides the reader with chapters that are mostly three to four pages long and includes both dialogue and graphics to break it up. How much easier could he make it for his readers? Oh, that’s right. It’s an audiobook, too. How’s that for McAmerica? Wait, two McDonald’s references in the same paragraph? Gaffigan is really onto something, here.
Gaffigan’s family dialogue truly makes the reader reflect on his or her own experiences, which makes his book more enjoyable and overall more relatable. He includes these anti-Hallmark moments in life that are simply precious, such as the time when his son genuinely asked him, “Why are you a stand-up chameleon?”
Gaffigan’s book flap opens by asking the reader if he or she has ever read a book that has changed his or her life, and then, in third-person, admits that he never has either. But Gaffigan offers a truthful yet hysterical look at parenthood that, while it may not change any lives like some Jenny Craig diet, it certainly gives perspective to the evolving nature of fatherhood.