A book about life, death, families of all ages, stages, and orientation . . . and sperm banks.
In this engaging and thoughtful collection of short stories, people of all ages try to make sense—poignant, often funny, sometimes wise—of the many, changing ways they intersect as parents, children, and families from conception to death.
In the first section, We're All Donors Here, an exasperated mother straight talks her disconsolate, perfectionist daughter who has transposed a number on her sperm order, "All this picking and choosing, all this getting it 'right' is a delusion. Always has been." What lies beyond right is what these donors and recipients of sperm banks, and those affected by their decisions, explore.
The ten stories in the second section, Whose Life Is It Anyway, focus on the dense interleaving of death as well as life on our understanding of our complex interdependence as children, spouses, and parents. "Do you ever feel you are living out someone else's story?" an artist asks her second husband and their assembled adult children. With the help of those they live with and love more or less well, and of their ghosts, living and dead, hungry and nurturing, the tellers of these ten stories, ages twenty to eighty, seek to get their lives back, and, surprisingly, do—mysteriously renewed.
