Kaz Cooke: Don’t read old copies of my pregnancy bible Up The Duff
Kaz Cooke warns expectant and new parents not to rely on old copies of her popular guide
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Back when author and cartoonist Kaz Cooke wrote the first edition of Up The Duff, her popular guide to pregnancy and birth, women and their partners typically thought carefully about who would get the big news first, and when. But 20 years later, a family member or best friend won’t necessarily be the first to hear. Today, the internet will have figured it out already.
“When people are pregnant in those first three months and they might not want to tell anyone, quite often the internet has worked out that they’re pregnant because of their searches,” says Cooke.
As a result, newly expectant parents are bombarded with ads for things they don’t need and deluged with misinformation from questionable sources.
“People think the search results are ordered by relevance, or that the top one in the list will be the most important or trustworthy one,” Cooke says. “They don’t realise that a lot of people are paying for those. Certainly the government has had to pay to make sure it’s above anti-vaccination sites for information about immunisation. So that’s a whole new world, isn’t it?”
For Cooke, all this makes Up The Duff more relevant than ever. The book has always been regularly republished with the latest input from medical experts. But the 20th anniversary edition — published this week — represents a major overhaul. Cooke has made certain, however, that Up The Duff has remained user-friendly, reassuring and very, very funny.
The book includes the Diary of Hermoine the Modern Girl’s pregnancy, with a smattering of Cooke’s piquant illustrations to keep the mood nice and light. Having said that, facts and accuracy are paramount to Cooke and she hopes people will use only this latest edition of Up The Duff because older editions are out of date.
“There’s dangerous information in the old books and I’m trying to convince people — and it sounds like I’m just trying to sell more books — but there are changes in the information about monitoring your baby movements in the last weeks of pregnancy, and the sleeping position of the mum is now known to be important later in pregnancy, and the first sleeping guidelines to reduce the risk of SIDS have changed in those 20 years,” Cooke says.
Her training as a journalist gave Cooke the “weird confidence” to ring up world medical experts while writing the first edition of Up The Duff. Those experts check and
re-check her work before publication. The book offers an honest portrait of pregnancy and birth to counter the unrealistic pictures of perfection that are often painted by crop-topped mummy bloggers.
Cooke backs The Sunday Telegraph’s Stellar magazine in its recent decision not to quiz interview subjects about their baby plans.
“You don’t know what their situation is, whether they’ve just had a miscarriage, whether there’s a reason things might be difficult. Or they may just not want to tell you. It’s just basic manners,” Cooke says.
Up The Duff, by Kaz Cooke, $45, Penguin Random House Australia