ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY

A moving, wildly diverse collection showing how radically different familial configurations can work.

Prompted by her experiences growing up in a family “fragmented and haunted by unfulfilled longings,” Walker (Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence, 2007, etc.) looks beyond her well-publicized estrangement from her mother, novelist Alice Walker, to the lives of other writers “searching for authenticity through experimentation” in their domestic situations. The essays she assembles smash class, race and gender stereotypes to collectively demonstrate the fluidity of the contemporary family unit. Resisting the traditional boundaries of coupledom, Jenny Block, on the one hand, celebrates the openness of what she calls a “polyamorous marriage” with her husband and her girlfriend. On the other hand, Judith Levine and her boyfriend, together for 17 years, never married for a number of practical and philosophic reasons. Writes Levine: “A marriage may or may not be a union of love. It is always a union of property...I’d like the state to get out of the sexual-licensing business altogether, actually, for couples gay, straight, bi, or none of the above.” Essays by Dan Savage and Dawn Friedman lay bare the highs and lows of open adoption. Savage details the difficulty he and his partner have in deciding what to say to their adoptive son when his homeless, substance-abusing biological mother drops out of touch for more than a year: “Which two-by-four to hit him with? That his mother was in all likelihood dead? Or that she was out there somewhere but didn’t care enough to come by or call?” Friedman, while admitting to occasional twinges of jealousy and guilt evoked by having her daughter’s birth mother integrated into their lives, trumpets openness for her daughter’s sake: “She will never have to wonder why her first mother chose adoption; she can ask her.” Rebecca Barry closes the anthology with a frank, humorous exploration of how she and her sister ended up in couples therapy.

Eye-opening and sometimes shocking, as it brilliantly explodes traditional notions about the nuclear family.