cover image My Father Married Your Mother: Writers Talk About Stepparents, Stepchildren, and Everyone In Between

My Father Married Your Mother: Writers Talk About Stepparents, Stepchildren, and Everyone In Between

, . . Norton, $24.95 (283pp) ISBN 978-0-393-06088-1

In an era of blended families, each group of stepparents, ex-spouses and newly mixed stepsiblings is unhappy in its own way, and Burt's collection of essays illuminates this brilliantly. Although feelings of anger, frustration and anxiety run throughout each piece, the writers also show the nuances specific to their familial tangles. The contributors constitute an impressive range of talent, from novelists Susan Cheever and Jacquelyn Mitchard to journalists Candy Cooper and Ted Rose. Also notable as writers are Lisa Shea, Andrew Solomon and actor Mike Dolan. The stories they tell are also broad, from happily sitting next to an ex-wife at a kid's football game to feeling torn between birth parents and struggling stepparents. One of the collection's most poignant essays comes from Barbara Kingsolver, who muses not on her particular post-divorce blend but on the way families are perceived and measured, often unfairly. "To judge a family's value by its tidy symmetry is to purchase a book for its cover," she writes. "There's no moral authority here." Without that symmetry, there are arguments, bad decisions, hurt feelings and an occasional, well-deserved triumph. (May)