37 pages • 1-hour read
Fortunately, the Milk
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Themes
Perseverance and Creativity in Overcoming Adversity
The theme of overcoming adversity through focus, determination, and perseverance runs throughout the book. The first “adversity” that the children and their father face after the mom leaves is their inability to heat up one of the frozen meals. This is quickly solved by going out to eat. The bigger problem comes the following morning when the children have no milk for their cereal; this becomes a dilemma for their father too since he needs milk for his tea. He solves this issue by going out to get some milk, determined to keep his children happy.
The father creates the next problem by stopping to chat to a friend. He avoids his children’s wrath by telling them an amazing story about the adversities that delayed him and how he ingeniously overcame them. The problems their father encounters while trying to get the milk home are extreme, dangerous, and terrifying, but he never loses sight of the goal: getting the milk home to his children. In every situation their father stays focused, explaining to Steg when they first meet “I […] need to get home in order to make sure my children get milk for their breakfast” (28).
Even though the obstacles the father overcomes involve being captured by strange creatures and other terrifying situations, he keeps the tale light, injecting humor and making his antagonists relatable. For example, the pirates invite him to join their crew, and the volcano god helps him explain “transtemporal metascience” (88).
Though the book doesn’t specify that the father is in a creative field, he embodies the stereotype of the head-in-the-clouds artist. On one hand, he is distracted and not present. However, his fictitious adventure brings his children joy. Through him, Gaiman shows the value of creativity.
Creativity can also teach one about resilience. According to The Long Now Foundation, Gaiman states:
[He] learned something important about stories from his cousin Helen Fagin, a Holocaust survivor who taught class in a Polish ghetto during the Nazi occupation. Books were forbidden on pain of death, but Helen had a Polish translation of Gone With the Wind she read at night, and she told its story to her entranced students by day. ‘The magic of escapist fiction,’ Gaiman said, ‘is that it can offer you escape from an otherwise intolerable situation, and it can furnish you with armor, knowledge, weapons, and other tools you can take back into your life to make it better’ (“Neil Gaiman, How Stories Last.” Longnow.org).
The Parent-Child Relationship
The children’s mother is clearly the organized parent in the family. In addition to working, she keeps track of “the important things that had to happen” (2), which include buying milk. The children’s father initially appears to be a hands-off, distracted parent who would rather be reading his newspaper than interacting with his children. When the children point out that they can’t eat their cereal, their father seems reluctant to go to the store—“he looked like he was going to suggest that we have something for breakfast that you do not need milk for, like sausages, but then he looked like he remembered that, without milk, he couldn't have his tea” (6). The father decides to get milk under the guise of caring about the children: “‘You poor children,’ he said. ‘I will walk down to the corner shop. I will get milk’” (6). However, their father (with his easily distractable character) gets sidetracked by a friend, making his children wait.
These first interactions do not portray a father who cares about not disappointing his children. However, the elaborate story he tells them to justify his tardiness conjures up a different image, one of a loving father who will do anything not to disappoint his children. The fictional father in the time-traveling story goes to unimaginable lengths and faces great dangers in order bring back the milk and not disappoint his children. He turns down the Pirate’s offer of a job: “I almost wish that I could […] But I have children. And they need their breakfast” (20). When faced with being a sacrificial offering to the Volcano god, the father’s only comment is: “But my children are waiting for their breakfast” (34). This reminder of why the father is willing to face such danger recurs in every section; the only time the father is sad is when he temporarily loses the milk and worries: “Now I will never get home. My children will never have breakfast” (44).
Professor Steg is a kind, empathic character who senses the father’s sadness at the thought of disappointing his children. She goes to great lengths to help the father return home with the milk intact. Even though they have just met, Steg views the father as her “companion.” Their relationship highlights the importance of friendship and collaboration and their impact on achieving individual goals.
The father gets his milk home with the help of Steg, and Steg gets the stone she needs for her time machine with the help of the father. By helping each other, the father can fulfill his mission to get his children their milk, and Steg is able to fulfill her role as a famous, galactic time-traveling inventor with a large and adoring future following.
The rapt enjoyment the children get from listening to the adventure mirrors the enjoyment their father gets from telling it. The father incorporates the children’s favorite things (ponies and dinosaurs) into his story, highlighting his caring, observant, and fun-loving nature. While the scatterbrained father might enjoy reading his newspaper in peace, he will also do anything not to disappoint his children.
The Power of Storytelling
In the book, storytelling transforms something as boring as going to the store to buy milk into a riveting adventure. In the father’s fantastical journey, the absurd meshes with the matter-of-fact. The father does not introduce the adventure as a fairytale, but as an event that actually occurred: “I walked out of the corner shop, and heard something odd that seemed to be coming from above me. […] ‘Hullo,’ I said to myself ‘that's not something you see every day’” (11).
The father talks about his time-traveling escapade in a casual tone, as if he were telling his children about the friend he met on the way home. Despite having waited a long time for their milk, and therefore their breakfast, the children are riveted by the adventure, unable to eat until they find out how their father managed to get back with the milk. Their father keeps the distinct episodes in his story brief to maintain pacing. He introduces Professor Steg, another likable protagonist, into the story. This gives the children another “person” to root for, in addition to his own persona, who he has placed firmly in the story’s center.
The father incorporates items that he sees in the kitchen as props and characters, showing how storytelling often starts with observations of surroundings, familiar situations, and memories. In an interview with Waterstones (available on YouTube), Gaiman shares that he once ran out of milk as a young man and substituted condensed milk for milk on his Sugar Puffs and got “a nasty shock.” He also explains that he wrote Fortunately, the Milk because he wanted to write a “non-dadist” book using a new style of storytelling, a “glorious, silly, goofy” blend of science fiction and fairytale. The story is a “celebration of storytelling” (“Neil Gaiman Discusses Fortunately, the Milk…” Youtube.com). The publisher, HarperCollins, describes the book as “an ode to the pleasure and wonders of storytelling itself” (“Gaiman Signs Multi-Book Deal with HarperCollins.” Publishersweekly.com).
Gaiman believes that fiction, though invented, can foster compassion and help people relate to the real world: “The most important thing that fiction does is it lets us look out through other eyes, and that teaches us empathy—that behind every pair of eyes is somebody like us” (“Neil Gaiman, How Stories Last.” Longnow.org). Beyond increasing empathy, creativity promotes learning. Gaiman points out that stories “teach us how the world is put together and the rules of living in the world, and they come in an attractive enough package that we take pleasure from them and want to help them propagate” (“Neil Gaiman, How Stories Last.” Longnow.org).
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