Writing Our Stories: Memoirs of Queer Parents
Looking for good reads from other LGBTQ parents? Want something book-length to really dig your teeth into? Check out nearly two dozen memoirs!
memoirs
A Book Birthday for “Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home”
I’m always excited by the publication of memoirs about LGBTQ families, and I’m happy to be part of the blog tour for Lara Lillibridge’s memoir Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home (Skyhorse Publishing), on its launch date and book birthday. Girlish is not a comfortable tale. It is, however, a reminder that we LGBTQ parents are as flawed as any others, and we should not let some ideal of perfection force us or our children into hiding their stories.
Faith and Family in New Memoir of Queer Motherhood
The tension between religion and LGBTQ identities is often portrayed in black and white—but a new memoir shows us the many nuances in one woman’s journey to reconcile her Catholic faith with her love for another woman as they fall in love, have children, and navigate parenthood.
A Holiday Guide to 2017’s LGBTQ Family Books
This year saw a great crop of books by, for, and about LGBTQ families. Here are some of my favorites. Make them yours (and your children’s), too!
Telling Stories of Jewish LGBTQ Families
The Jewish High Holiday season is this week, so let’s take a look at some new stories that feature queer, Jewish families, including a children’s picture book and a grown-up memoir by a woman with four lesbian moms.
Gay Dad’s Funny New Memoir on International Adoption
A friend of Jeffrey Roach and Ken Manford once told them that as the first gay dads many people had ever seen, “You’re ambassadors whether you like it or not.” Roach’s new memoir “PopDaddy: Boy Meets Boy Meets Baby” might thus be considered a sort of ambassadorial communiqué, but with a hefty addition of humor and heart.
Two Books Tell the Stories of LGBTQ Families
Stories have power. Two new collections of stories about the creation of LGBTQ families reinforce that point with two very different approaches.
Keeping the Queer in Queer Families
The tension between assimilation and queerness has long hovered over the LGBTQ community. As English writer Jonathan Kemp said a few years ago, “The assimilationists want gay marriage, inclusion in the military, the right to adopt children…. Queers, on the other hand … [regard] the most vibrant and radical aspect of homosexuality as being precisely its opposition to normative sexuality and society.” Two new memoirs, however, show that these concepts do not always have to oppose each other.
Two New Memoirs Show Transformative Power of Parenthood
Two new, very different memoirs continue to expand our sense of what an LGBT family looks like. One is the story of a lesbian mom struggling against her son’s anti-gay Catholic school while grappling with her relationship to the Church and to her own mother. The other is about a butch lesbian and her experience being pregnant—the print version of a graphic novel first serialized online.
A Baker’s Dozen of Memoirs By and About Lesbian Moms
In honor of mothers today, here are a baker’s dozen of memoirs by and about lesbian moms. They are not just for lesbian or LGBT audiences, however, but shed light on many of the universal challenges and blessings of motherhood.