TV producer, writer, and influencer Joseph Tito’s memoir of becoming a single gay dad via surrogacy is a well-paced, thoughtful, and thought-provoking read. Tito, a dual Canadian-Italian citizen, was a jet-setting executive running a production company, living in Bahrain, and visiting his partner in Italy on weekends. Becoming a father had been a subconscious desire, but was sparked into prominence after a conversation with his young niece. “I want to build something bigger than just my own experiences. I want a family,” he writes.
His choice was to have a biological child, which meant surrogacy and the financial, legal, and ethical challenges that that raised. Difficulties rose at almost every turn—finding a country where he could both afford the surrogacy fees and legally work with a surrogate; hoping that the clinic he found in Kenya treated the surrogate with respect; persevering through multiple attempts to conceive; being cut off from the surrogate in a system that didn’t want them to know each other; navigating an administrative labyrinth for the correct paperwork; advocating so that Canada would recognize his child as Canadian.
The narrative moves smoothly between the throughline of Tito’s parenthood journey in the 2010s and the past events that shaped him, including his relationships with his parents and partners. We see how even the outward trappings of success, like luxury cars and Italian leather shoes, were no longer able to satisfy him as the pull of parenthood grew stronger, and how becoming a parent strengthened his connections to his own parents and heritage. Tito tells his story with engaging prose, revealing self-reflection, and often notable turns of phrase: A nutrition shake intended to boost sperm count “tasted like someone had blended chalk with disappointment.” An e-mail about potential egg donor profiles “sat in my inbox, the subject line both clinical and cosmic.”
Importantly, Tito captures the odd dual nature of surrogacy when he writes, “This was a transaction and it was also a gift, and pretending it was only one of those would have been a kind of dishonesty.” He writes, too, about the inequities and injustices of the surrogacy system he navigated, a system that was technically legal but unregulated, which he had not realized meant different things. And he grapples with holding two truths, as he sees them: being the father of two daughters who exist because of commercial surrogacy, but having brought them into his life via a system whose flaws became clearer as he went on.
This is not fundamentally a book about the international surrogacy system, though, but rather about one man’s journey to fatherhood and family, even as that intertwines with larger systems that raise uncomfortable questions. I appreciate that Tito allows that discomfort to emerge and does not try to force simplistic answers on nuanced issues. Tito is also clear from the start that he does not intend the book to be a guide for anyone else; rather, “This is my truth, as I lived it, remembered it, and chose to share it.” We should be glad he did.
