“Anyone who defines hell as being stuck for eternity with an adulterous deserter, a lesbian sadist and a narcissistic baby-murderer has never spent an hour at a Mommy and Me class,” writes war-photographer-turned-mom-of-three, Deborah Copaken Kogan.

Or, as she titles her book, “Hell is Other Parents.”

Having spent four years in places like caves with people like the Taliban — detailed in her earlier memoir, “Shutterbabe” — Kogan has a way of keeping things in (global) perspective. When her daughter is whining about wanting an extra cupcake, Kogan — just back from a trip to Pakistani refugee camps — exclaims: “That’s enough! There are places in the world where there are no cupcakes!”

When she ends up in a double room of a Manhattan maternity ward with a teen mom swearing and blaring Montel, Kogan tries to remember that she’s endured worse in the Hindu Kush.

And when psyching herself up for a 12-hour drive to her son’s acting camp in Maine — with her two-year-old — she scoffs at her husband’s worries.

“I reminded him that I had once spent several weeks packed cheek to jowl with Afghan soldiers in the back of an open truck as snow and Soviet bombs fell from the sky; that I had found my way in and out of the jungles of Zimbabwe; that I drove across the continent of Europe in a twenty-year-old jalopy with my psychotic Romanian boyfriend after we’d broken up.” How hard could the Maine trek be?

Not surprisingly, but delightfully (for us readers): ridiculously hard! Bam — the entire barrel of Goldfish crackers is upside down in minutes. A Herman’s Hermits’ tape is put on infinite loop. When Kogan finally gets to the camp, a counselor refuses to let the baby take a nap in the cabin because a camper seeing him “might get homesick.” Kogan is at her best when chronicling small minds making stupid, compassion-free decisions.

She’s also excellent at chronicling what life is like when you don’t have quite enough money to make Manhattan life easy: Her five-person family (plus one un-housebroken dog) lives in a shabby two-bedroom they expected to move out of in a year. It’s been seven. When her son starts making money as an actor — and ends up playing the adolescent Spock in the new Star Trek movie — he makes more in five weeks than she has made in the last five years as a writer.

A pity party this ain’t, but Kogan’s money worries hang over her, including the fact that arranging a “day off” (for surgery) takes scads of cash and phone calls before all her children are accounted for. A yurt in Peshawar starts sounding like a pleasant alternative to middle class life in the big city.”

Hell is Other Parents

And Other Tales of Maternal Combustion

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

Voice