The Velveteen Father: An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood

In his late 30s, award-winning journalist and novelist Green (O Beautiful) became a father to two boys after he fell in love with their adoptive father. In this memoir, he offers a moving series of meditations on what it means to be a child, a parent, a gay man and a Jew in a culture that often avoids complicated discussions of these identities. Drawing on his own childhood experiences as the second son of a Jewish mother and Catholic father in Philadelphia and those of his partner, Andy, he probes the social fears around gay men and children, the conflation of parenthood and adulthood and the role that Jewish family traditions played in his desire to create a family. Green is clearheaded and unsentimental in analyzing how he gave up his orderly, work-centered ""Mary Richards"" sort of life and replaced it with fatherhood. He also makes a number of astute observations, such as when he suggests that gay men's desire to parent is a reaction to the AIDS epidemic or when he assesses the initially negative reactions of both his and his lover's parents to gay men raising children. While the bulk of this memoir is intensely personal, Green maintains a chatty style that can give way to glib generalizations (""This is what gay men did instead of having children: they had houses"") or easy moralizing. But more often, Green's opinions hit home, and are likely to challenge both gay and straight readers. Agent, Cynthia Cannell. (May)