One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk About Polyamory, Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood, and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love

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About One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk About

Product Description A volume of essays evaluates how modern-world circumstances, from gay adoption and absent fathers to open marriages and green-card marriages are changing the domestic scene today, in an anthology that includes contributions by such figures as ZZ Packer, Dan Savage, and Min Jin Lee. 20,000 first printing. From Publishers Weekly These plainspoken, cage-rattling essays, collected by Walker ( What Makes a Man), address how dramatically the traditional nuclear American family has changed. Jenny Block's And Then We Were Poly sets the decidedly unconventional tone by insisting that her and her husband's embrace of other sexual partners allows them a more joyful, fulfilling commitment to each other. A gay couple adopts the child of a self-destructive street girl in Dan Savage's DJ's Homeless Mommy, then tries to keep the mother in touch with her son. In Sharing Madison, Dawn Friedman, another parent of an adoptee, writes of her agonizing process of overcoming the guilt she feels in having taken baby Madison away from her teenage mother. Antonio Caya, in Daddy Donoring, recounts his rational decision to sire his friend's child, firmly remaining a donor, not a daddy, so as not to muddle the issue. Children of mixed race force a much-needed altering of people's perceptions, as ZZ Packer explores in The Look, while Susan McKinney de Ortega's choice to marry a much younger Mexican man and make a home in Mexico challenges the American notion of middle-class values. These fresh, diverse views represent an authentic, valuable new reality. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author Rebecca Walker has received numerous awards and accolades for her writing and activism. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and publications; in addition to the international bestseller Black, White, and Jewish, her books include Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence, and the anthologies To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, which has become a standard text in gender studies courses around the world, and What Makes a Man: 22 Writers Imagine the Future. A popular speaker at universities and in business settings, Walker teaches the art of memoir at workshops and writing conferences internationally. She lives in Hawaii.