The Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out

In this affecting and eloquent account of the Dew family members' attempts to come to terms with the homosexuality of the elder son, who came out to his parents while a sophomore at Yale, Stephen emerges as a remarkably resilient and self-aware young man. The emphasis of the book, however, is not on him but on his parents, scrambling to reorient themselves in the wake of a revelation that uncovers prejudices these liberal, educated people did not know they had. Their movement out of bewilderment and into acceptance and activism--the Dews join a network of parents of gays and lesbians and petition for institutional support for gay and lesbian students at the prep schools their sons attended--makes for absorbing, inspiring reading. The author's husband Charles teaches history at Williams College; she is an American Book Award-winning novelist ( Dale Loves Sophie to Death ) whose fiction charts with compassion and nuance the durability of the American family. Dew's memoir complements these qualities with articulate outrage at entrenched homophobia. 40,000 first printing; first serial to Good Housekeeping; QPB selection; audio rights to Simon & Schuster. (May)