Introduction: my brother and the letter / John Preston -- Abuelo: my grandfather, Raymond Acuna / Michael Nava -- The way back home: revisiting my grandfather / Eric Latzky -- Mother / Laurence Tate -- The lost umbilical cord: my mother / Brian Kirkpatrick -- She's my mother / Larry Duplechan -- Mother, Isaac, and horses / R. Nikolaus Merrell -- My mother's ghost / Steven Saylor -- What she gave me: my mother Regina and history / Harlan Greene -- Father's sorrow, Father's joy / Darrell G. H. Schramm -- Kentucky 55 south: a visit with Dad / James Carroll Pickett -- My father picking plums / Bernard Cooper -- My father / Martin Palmer -- Jim my father / Bob Summer -- My entire life, and my father / Albert Clarke -- My brother on the shoulder of the road / Clifford Chase -- To my brother with love / John Champagne -- The brother, the glasses, the crackers, the turtle / Michael Bronski -- Uncle Sam / Arnie Kantrowitz -- My uncle, sitting beneath the tree / Andrew Holleran -- Second cousin / Philip Gambone -- When my sister laughs / Charles Henry Fuller -- My sister of perpetual mercy / David Rakoff -- My sister hated Little Richard / Brandon Judell -- My sister and I / Ronald L. Donaghe -- Sisterly advice / Christopher Wittke -- Sister / William Haywood Henderson

In A Member of the Family the most talented gay writers of our time turn their hearts and psyches inside out to show us the families who gave birth to them, raised them, rejected them, exiled them, and loved them. There are no stereotypes here. Each essay, commissioned specifically for this collection, describes a family that is unique and so idiosyncratic that it can belong only to the author - and so familiar and universal that it reminds us startlingly of our own

John Preston begins the anthology with the question interviewers still ask him: "What do your parents think?" Then he remembers his past, the angry letter he left for his parents the day he moved out of their home forever, and the unsuspected impact that letter had on his younger brother. Other authors write too of letters they left or sent, of hurts they gave and received, of reconciliations and unresolved conflicts. The results are extraordinary. Michael Nava writes of

his stoic, enigmatic grandfather, embittered in middle age and a living portrait of the man Nava himself might become; Eric Latzky, on the other hand, makes the heart ache with his portrayal of his grandfather, Louis; and Larry Duplechan mixes laughter and tears with his hard-edged, wise-cracking description of his mother, who called the love of his life "crap" and said learning he was gay was like hearing he'd been killed in a car crash...but he was still her baby

Growing up with parents who survived the Holocaust left Harlan Greene with different kinds of scars; and Brian Kirkpatrick has created a brilliant gem of introspection, fantasy, and pain about the mother who abandoned him in a Catholic orphanage. Through their daring honesty and exceptional talents, each of the twenty-four authors has created modern American literature out of autobiography with masterfully rendered episodes that risk exposing so much about their lives

and in turn, effectively reveal to us much about our own. A deeply emotional and beautifully conceived collection, A Member of the Family raises simple truths about our families to the universal truth of art

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