Please Don't Eat the Daisies

Please Don't Eat the Daisies (New York: Doubleday, 1957) is a best-selling collection of humorous essays by American humorist and playwright Jean Kerr about suburban living and raising four boys. The essays do not have a plot or through-storyline, but the book sold so well it was later adapted into a film starring Doris Day and David Niven. The film was later adapted into a television series starring Patricia Crowley and Mark Miller. Mrs. Kerr followed up this book with two later best-selling collections, The Snake Has All the Lines and Penny Candy.

The introduction serves as yet another humorous essay, as Kerr describes how she came to be a writer. “I won't say that my early efforts were crowned with glory. Oh, I'd say it, all right, but could I make it stick? When my first play was produced in New York, Louis Kronenberger wrote in Time, with a felicity it took me only ten years to appreciate, that "Leo G. Carroll brightens up Mrs. Kerr's play in much the same way that flowers brighten a sickroom." (I guess this is what they mean by the nick of Time.) I don't know why this and similar compliments for Leo G. Carroll didn't stay my hand forever. As someone pointed out recently, if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation” (Kerr 1957).

Kerr begins the book with her classic take on parenting four small boys. “We are being very careful with our children. They'll never have to pay a psychiatrist twenty-five dollars an hour to find out why we rejected them. We'll tell them why we rejected them. Because they're impossible, that's why” (Kerr 1957).

The trials and tribulations of an author who hopes her letters are being collected for future publication. “If you have a friend who is a playwright, it's simpler. You begin collecting him immediately after his first failure. As letter writers, playwrights are at the top of their powers at this moment. For color, passion, and direct revelation of character you simply can't beat a letter from a playwright who has just had a four-day flop” (Kerr 1957).

Kerr's take on the popular trend of writers moving to the country to reconnect with nature. “The thing that worries me is that I am so different from other writers, Connecticut is just another state to me. And nature -well, nature is just nature. When I see a tree whose leafy mouth is pressed against the earth's sweet flowing breast, I think, "Well, that's a nice-looking oak," but it doesn't change my way of life” (Kerr 1957).

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