"Roads to Family: All the Ways We Come to Be" hits shelves in April
One more month, and my book is out!
I just experienced the unadulterated joy of seeing my book - Roads to Family - listed on the Lerner Books Publishing website! Isn’t that a beautiful sight? This is truly a dream come true.
The book doesn’t actually get published until April 4th. So this is really a pause to celebrate a milestone, rather than a final victory. Perhaps when I hold the actual bad boy in my hand, I’ll be able to declare that the dream has, for reals, come true.
Looking at the lively, colorful cover got me thinking about the whole process.
To write the book, I interviewed over twenty families and individuals. I listened to their stories – none of which mirrored another; and all of which informed my understanding of how babies and families are made. So the book is about two things:
It’s about all the ways that we, humans, reproduce, which I find unexplainably fascinating. And when I say all, I mean all. It uses the interviewees' experiences to explain how sex, insemination, IVF, donor conception and surrogacy work to create a new human being.
It’s also about family. It delves into how the interviewees think and feel about family, the words they choose to use, and how inadequate the existing words often are.
While writing and editing each person’s narrative, Uncle Ben’s words of wisdom (and warning) to Peter Parker (aka Spiderman) often infiltrated my brain, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” I believe in the power of the pen, and felt the weight and privilege of telling someone else’s story.
Each and every person I interviewed had a chance to review their narratives at least a couple of times; so that they sounded accurate and truthful. For a couple people, I tried and tried, and just couldn’t get their story quite right, so they are not included in the book. What remains are the authentic stories of people willing to share the most intimate and personal parts of their lives – parts that often involved sorrow, loss, and grief before resulting in great joys. What an honor it was to have earned their trust.
The hardest part of writing this book, however, wasn’t handling the ominous responsibility that comes with telling someone else’s story. And, don’t get me wrong. That was really hard. The most difficult aspect was deciding whose story made it into the final product and whose story didn’t. Without my editors at Lerner Publishing by my side, I would have remained frozen; unable to pick and choose; for all of the stories deserve an audience.
To guide our decisions, I had to make a multi-dimensional rubric: sex, insemination (home or clinic), IVF; sperm donor (known or unknown), egg donor (known or unknown); surrogate (gestational or genetic, personal or agency); adoption (domestic or international, open or closed), foster (infant or child), divorce, blended, extended; race/ethnicity; religion; political affiliation; geographic location; single, partnered, straight, LGBTQAI+; able bodied, neuro-diverse; socio-economics. And those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head.
Ultimately, we wanted to show a variety of experiences but we also wanted each chapter to build on the concepts of the previous chapter, so that readers could grow their knowledge base as they progressed through the text. This was no easy task. In fact, it was downright daunting. If I had tried to represent every means of reproduction across all human characteristics and experiences, the book would have been larger than my house. What remains is our darn best to scaffold unique family stories into an engaging learning experience for our readers.
To me, this book is a love story to the people who participated in this project – to those whose narratives made it directly into the book and to those whose narratives inform the book behind the scenes. And to the readers who I hope will be informed and empowered by their stories.