A Manifesto for Taking Back the Weekend

At the beginning of Katrina Onstad’s The Weekend Effect: The Life-Changing Benefits of Taking Time Off and Challenging the Cult of Overwork, the author’s 12-year-old son asks on a Sunday night, “Was that the weekend?” “Yes, it was,” she replies. “But,” he says, “it didn’t feel like a weekend.” Onstad, gripped with the anxiety any mom would have if her child were unaware that he’d just lived through two days off, does an audit of her family’s last 48 hours. What she finds is a mix of work email, homework help, laundry, hockey practice, dog wrangling, grocery shopping, and more. The postmortem concludes: “To keep Sunday distinguishable from Saturday, I might top off the above with some light toilet cleaning.”

The Weekend Effect (HarperOne, $25.99) is Onstad’s chronicle of trying to rescue herself, her husband, and their two kids from the tyranny of overscheduling. It will read as familiar to many working parents, minus perhaps all the references to hockey (the author lives in Toronto). A journalist, Onstad takes a reportorial approach to solving the Mystery of the Disappearing Weekend, plunging herself into—and extricating herself from—various activities to provide a front-line account of how she tried, mostly successfully, to use her freedom more wisely. She attends an “ecstatic dance” party at 8:30 a.m. on a Sunday, gift-wraps Christmas presents for low-income families, joins a running club, and doesn’t eat brunch, which she spends four-plus pages denouncing as “digestively as well as acoustically abrasive.”