Volume 1, No. 4: Queer Parenting + The Best Rye Brownies
Greetings, book-eaters and food-lovers! Yesterday I saw a Northern Flicker at my bird feeder. I am new to birding, but watching the birds at my feeder has become one of my most beloved daily rituals. I’d never seen a flicker before. They are stunning! It was exciting.
Onward to books. This week’s theme is close to my heart. I’m not a parent, and I don’t currently have plans to become one. But I love books about queer parenthood. It’s partly because If I ever do decide to become a parent, I’ll be the queer kind. But it’s mostly because I have a lot of Very Strong Feelings about parenthood and motherhood and marriage and the narrow heteronormative assumptions and expectations surrounding them. Books about queer parents often complicate parenthood. Queer people have redefining and expanding what it means to be a parent for ages. Many (but certainly not all) queer parents don’t stumble into having kids. And many (though certainly not all) queer parents have had to defend their families, which don’t always take traditional shapes. Even if I never become a parent, I see myself in these stories.
Books about queer parenthood allow me to imagine a future in which family-making and parenthood include infinite possibilities. They remind me that multiple timelines are possible, that ‘get married and have kids by 35’ is just one route on a limitless map, that there are many other roads to many other destinations, and many other worthwhile journeys to take.
The Books
Backlist: Full Disclosure by Camryn Garrett (YA fiction, 2019)
Of the three books here, this one has got the least queer parenting in it by far. Besides the fact that I adore this book with my whole heart and need everyone to read it immediately, that’s one of the reasons I wanted to include it. It’s a contemporary YA novel about Simone, a HIV+ teenager with gay dads. Her family is a part of her life, but it’s not the focus of her life. Queer parents as background characters in YA are becoming more and more common (yay!), but this book engages with Simone’s queer family in a way that feels both honest and complicated.
Simone is bisexual, and the central romance is M/F. Throughout much of the book, she struggles with feelings of being “queer enough”. Can she call herself bisexual because she’s had crushes on female celebrities? Does it count if she’s only ever liked one girl in real life? She has all these doubts and insecurities even though she’s surrounded by queer people: in addition to her dads, her two best friends are a bisexual girl and an asexual lesbian.
This struggle felt so familiar to me, and Garrett writes about it so thoughtfully. People often assume that just because you grow up with access to an idea—if you’re raised by gay men, for instance—that claiming a queer identity will be easy. But that’s not always the case. Simone isn’t afraid of coming out, but her specific journey to owning and celebrating her queerness is not simple. It’s not simple because she’s been immersed in queer community all her life. I love books that delve into the messiness of queer communities and identities and families. We are not a monolith. Sometimes we hurt each other. Sometimes we can’t see each other. This book is about all of that.
I also love the complexity of all the minor characters in this book. Though Simone is the star, her family and friends have their own backstories and emotional messes and contradictions. There’s a lot going on with Simone’s dads’ relationship, with her best friends, with the people in her HIV+ support group. It gives the novel a wonderful depth. You can feel so many stories pulsing just below the surface.
One of those stories is the story of Simone’s dads. Simone has been HIV+ since birth. Her parents lived through the epidemic and lost so many friends; adopting her is a part of that story. Certainly, her experiences as an HIV+ teenager in the 2000s are different from her dads’ experience with HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. What I’m getting at is that this queer family feels very specific to me. Garrett explores queer lineage and history, generational change, the blurry lines between found family and bio family, what’s translatable and what isn’t. Queer parenting in this novel isn’t a thing. Also, it’s a thing. It’s a really extraordinary balance.
If I haven’t convinced you to read it yet, this book is super sex positive! Teenage girls have on-page conversations about masturbation and sex toys! Scenes include a gynecologist appointment, a trip to a sex shop, a quick stop to pick up birth control, and a lot of tender joking about sex between friends and romantic partners. It’s so open and refreshing.
And it’s funny! I laughed out loud so many times. There’s an adorable romance and lots of musical theatre. It’s also serious, as much of the plot revolves around the stigma and bigotry Simone faces. But Garrett blends everything perfectly. I honestly can’t wait to read it again.
Frontlist: Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (Adult fiction)
People often talk about books as being either windows or mirrors: a reflection of the self or a vista into another kind of self. But the queer books I love most are not windows or mirrors, or even both. They are some miraculous blending of the two. Some new thing. A mirwindow, maybe: familiar, intimate, expansive, untranslatable, challenging. That’s what this book was for me. It is so deeply immeshed in queer and trans lives. Peters kisses the straight cis gaze goodbye.
I could write pages and pages about how much I love this book, about all the layers of brilliance inside it, about how funny and tender and sharp it is. What a captivating story. What messy, infuriating characters. The aliveness of it, the truth of it, the vividness of each scene, all the tangled threads of story twisting through it. Instead, I’m going to focus on a few of the ways this book engages with queer parenting. I wrote some other thoughts in my Goodreads review. Queer parenting is just a teeny tiny fraction of what this novel is about.
The story revolves around three women. Reese is a trans woman in her mid-thrities who’s always wanted a baby. Ames, Reese’s ex, is a trans woman who is now living as a man. His girlfriend, Katrina, is a divorced cis woman. When Katrina gets pregnant, Ames approaches Reese with a proposition: that the three of them raise the baby together, forming their own kind of non-traditional family.
There are plenty of books about having kids, and plenty of books about wanting or not wanting kids. This book isn’t really about any of that. It’s about parenthood as an identity. The characters in this book, in different ways and for different reasons, are all struggling with what it means to become a parent. The question isn’t so much: do I want kids? or even how will I have kids? The question is: who will I be as a parent?
This central question is part of why the book resonated so deeply with me. When I talk about having kids with my peers, the focus is almost always on the kids. We talk about how kids will change a life, sure. We talk about the challenges and heartaches of wanting kids while not having a partner. We talk about the hows and whys of it: why we want kids or don’t, how to have kids as a single person or not. Rarely do we talk about parenthood as an identity in conversation with other identities. Rarely do we talk about parenthood as a path to family, rather than a path to child-rearing.
These are the things that Reese, Ames, and Katrina talk about in this novel. They grapple with how parenthood will change them. They wrestle with how their experiences of parenthood—as well as the world’s expectations of who they’ll become as parents and how they’ll preform parenthood—are different for each of them because of who they are. Reese is a trans woman who has always wanted to be mother in a world which considers motherhood the pinnacle of womanhood, but constantly devalues trans women’s lives and experiences. Ames is a trans woman living as a man, who knows that he cannot be a father, and also knows that if he raises a baby with Katrina, that’s how the world will see him. Katrina is a divorced cis woman, who is pregnant, who is wondering if it’s possible to rebuild her life outside of the heteronormative expectations society places on her.
There’s a passage that I can’t stop thinking about, when Ames first brings up the idea of the three of them co-parenting with Reese:
“It had only ever been through her, with her, that he could imagine parenthood. Why not again? Reese—the trans woman from whom he’d learned about womanhood—would see his fatherhood and dismiss it. To her, he would always be a woman. By borrowing her vantage, he could almost see himself as a parent: Perhaps one way to tolerate being a father would be to have her constant presence assuring him that he was actually not one. This possibility dovetailed with what he wanted anyway: to be family with Reese once more, in some way. So why not parenthood? Was it such a wild proposal to contemplate? Were Reese to help raise the child too, everyone would get what they wanted. Katrina would have commitment to family from her lover, Reese would get a baby, and he, well, he’d get to live up to what they both hoped he could be by being what he already was: a woman but not, a father but not.”
Ames has a specific vantage point, here, and yet his fears and desires about the possibilities—good and bad—of parenthood feel so familiar to me. This is what Peters does so brilliantly over and over again. Through the specificity of her characters, through their nuances and messes and the mistakes they make, she creates space for her readers, also, to grapple.
Upcoming: The Natural Mother of the Child by Krys Malcolm Belc (Memoir, Counterpoint, 6/15)
Have you ever read a book you love so much that reviewing it feels impossible? That’s how I feel about this book. Wow wow wow wow wow. Where do I start? How about here: this is a memoir, and I generally do not stay up late reading memoirs. But I read this book in two days. I cast aside all other responsibilities to finish it. Belc’s writing is stunning. There is a fervent honesty to it, a forward momentum that captured me and held me. I couldn’t stop reading, I did not want to look away, and when I was done, I felt both renewed and bereft.
This is a hard book to describe. If you stop reading this review right now and go pre-order or request it at your library, I will be happy. Belc is a transmasculine parent, and this is a memoir about his family. It’s about his kids, his partner, his parents and siblings, about his shifting experiences of queerness and transness over the course of his life. The heart of the book is in his relationship with his son, Samson, and the particular joy, loneliness, weirdness, delight, and pain of making a kid as a trans person. He writes about how growing a child changed his understanding of his body and himself, and how it didn’t. There is so much incredible writing about embodiment in this book: how we talk about bodies and how we live in them and the many ways bodies connect us to other people: through kinship, biology, genes, lineage, love.
It’s only in the last five years that I’ve started reading nonfiction seriously. In that time, I've encountered a few books that have changed everything—me, how I think about writing, how I think about the world: In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, and Exile and Pride by Eli Clare. The Natural Mother of the Child stands firmly in that lineage. What all of these miraculous works have in common (okay, besides queerness) is their willingness to be so many things at once. Like the queer and trans writers of those beloved books, Belc lays out truth after truth: messy, contradictory, startling, sad, confusing, glorious truths, bared on the page, one after another. He doesn’t edit or justify or neaten them. Here are a few of the many lines I can’t stop thinking about:
“If I’ve lost a part of what I had with my mother, with your mother even, I know it is not possible that I still have all of what you fell in love with.”
“Things are simple for me now. Safe. I am a dad and you are a mom. The body I had, the body that made Samson, has faded into the past…I never feel paranoid that you will leave me for someone else because she is a woman, but I do worry you miss the part of me other people never think to imagine.”
“I am not sure how much, in those months Samson lived in me, I belonged to me and how much I belonged to him.”
“Nothing about being pregnant made me feel feminine. This body is what it is: not quite man, not quite woman, but with the parts to create and shape life. To expel and care for that life. Creating Samson, given such a strong name because I felt I had dome something strong, made me ready to be me.”
The other thing that places this book in a particular lineage of queer nonfiction I love is the way Belc plays with form, messes with genre and structure. There’s an absolutely stunning section, “First Seen in Print”, in which Belc uses his birth certificate to write about gender and trans identity. He footnotes the various parts of the document and then expands on them, using names and dates and places to tell the stories that have shaped his life.
“Breasts: A History” is all about his relationship with his body, but it’s full of excerpts and quotes from other writers (including Nelson). He writes about breastfeeding and pregnancy, contemplating top surgery and taking testosterone—in short, it’s a catalogue of the many ways that bodies can change. It’s intimate, but it’s also full of history, science, and pop culture. The way he braids all of these truths together is astounding.
Like Nelson and Machado and Clare, Belc is an author who deliberately queers the text itself. Like queerness, like transness, this book breaks all the rules. Everything that Belc has to say about queer and trans bodies, about their possibilities and limitations, is reflected in the structure of the book itself. It’s fluid and nonlinear, textual and visual, personal and historical, a blend of words and empty space and legal documents and photographs. It refuses to be boxed, defined, catalogued, pinned down.
I was flipping through the book as I wrote this and I kept getting lost in the text. I know it will become foundational for me, that I’ll return to it again and again. Belc opens up a million doors into the wide expanse of queer and trans parenthood, and does not shut a single one. It’s out June 15th and you can pre-order it here. Do yourself a favor and don’t wait on this one.
The Bake
Parenting might be complicated, but baking doesn’t have to be! This week’s recipe is one of my all-time favorite brownies. I’ve recently become obsessed with using rye flour in baked goods, and it’s especially wonderful here. There’s something magical about the rye and chocolate combo. Don’t ask me what it is. It’s just really, really good. These brownies are rich and fudgey but not overly sweet. And so easy! You melt some chocolate and butter, whisk up some eggs, add flour, and bake.
The Best Rye Brownies
Adapted from The Violet Bakery Cookbook by Claire Ptak
Makes 20-24 brownies
Ingredients
156 grams (11 Tbs) unsalted butter
300 grams (10.5 ounces) bittersweet chocolate, roughly chopped (this is my favorite chocolate—it’s not cheap, but I buy it in bulk which helps a bit)
200 grams (1.5 cups) whole-grain rye flour (local Valley folks, this is my favorite mill; they also ship nationwide!)
50 grams (1/2 cup) unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
4 eggs
165 grams (3/4 cup) toasted sugar (yes, I use toasted sugar in everything)
175 grams (1 cup) brown sugar
1 Tbs vanilla
1 tsp flaky sea salt, for sprinkling
Preheat oven to 350. Butter a 9x13” baking pan.
Melt the butter and chocolate in a metal bowl set over a pan of simmering water (or in a double boiler). Stir gently until thoroughly melted and set aside to cool.
In a small bowl, whisk together the rye flour, cocoa, baking powder, and salt.
In a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or using handheld beaters, beat the eggs, both sugars, and vanilla until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Pour in the cooled melted chocolate and mix until smooth. Add the flour mixture and mix well.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top, pushing the batter evenly into the corners. Sprinkle with flaky salt. Bake about 25 minutes. The brownies will be mostly firm, but still have a bit of a wobble in the middle. A tester won’t come out completely clean. They’ll firm up as they cool.
The original recipe says they’re best within a day of baking, but I’ve enjoyed them for two or three at least. They also freeze beautifully. Personally, I like them best about five minutes out of the freezer.
The Bowl & The Beat
The Bowl: Springy Salad with Sautéed Mushrooms and Fried Bread
A few years back, a friend of mine turned me on to frying my bread instead of toasting it. Let. Me. Tell. You. It changed everything. We’re not talking deep-frying here; this isn’t complicated. We’re talking pan-frying. Instead of popping your bread in the toaster, pop it in a pan with a bit of butter (or bacon fat, if you’re into that). It changed my world; I hope it changes yours.
Remember back when I said I wasn’t a salad for dinner person? Well, here I am with another salad I’ve had for dinner at least three times in the last three weeks. Oh well. It’s tasty and refreshingly springy, but also filling. Probably because of the fried bread.
Put some spinach in a bowl. Slice some mushrooms and sauté them in plenty of butter. Dump those into the bowl. Add some cheese. I like fresh mozzarella, torn or cubed. Feta is also good, or grated Parmesan, or whatever you like best. Add some more butter to the mushroom pan, and fry up a few slices of bread. A few minutes on each side on medium-low heat should do it. If it’s not browning nicely, add more butter. Cube your deliciously buttery bread and add it the bowl. Chop up some hard-boiled eggs and add those (boil some if you don’t have any around, or leave them out, you know the drill). On the rare occasions that I buy myself smoked salmon as a treat, I put it in this salad. Make a dressing of olive oil, mustard, red wine vinegar, pressed garlic, salt, and pepper. Toss it all together. Yum.
Pro tip: if you fry your bread in bacon fat, you can make the dressing in the pan. Add some mustard and red wine vinegar to whatever fat is left after you’ve cooked your bread. Stir over low heat until it reduces a little. Then pour that over your salad.
The Beat: The Dark Fantastic by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, read by Janina Edwards
I just started this book this morning. So far I’ve only listened to the introduction, but I’m really into it. Thomas is a scholar, educator, writer, and lifelong fantasy lover. She sets out to explore how race functions in speculative YA and children’s books, looking specifically at four Black female characters in popular YA novels and TV series written by white creators.
In the introduction, she speaks a lot about the imagination gap—the failure of our cultural imagination to write people of color into fantastical, speculative stories. This really struck a chord with me. It’s clear even from the first twenty minutes that this book isn’t just about media representation, nor is it exclusively a work of literary criticism blended with critical race theory. It’s both of those things, but it’s this piece about the function of the imagination, and the ways racism and white supremacy are built into so many imaginative realms, that I’m most excited about digging into.
As a side note, I absolutely love the narrator, Janina Edwards. I loved her work on The Office of Historical Corrections—which is a brilliant book, go listen!
The Boost
A few things vaguely relating to this week’s newsletter, and that I care about generally:
Donate to the Black Mama’s Bail Out Fund
Detransition, Baby was the February pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club. There’s a syllabus with some great stuff in it, including links to reviews, interviews with Torrey Peters, background reading, etc. I recommend checking it out if (when!) you pick up the book.
Donate to the Trans Asylum Seeker Support Network, a “border abolitionist direct action and mutual aid collective focused on supporting transgender asylum seekers” based in my Western Mass community.
Image: An Instagram post by Trans Asylum Support. The text ‘The Trans Asylum Seeker Support Network” appears over a collage of photos of many faces. Below are the words: We are building lifelong comradeships and siblinghoods, across the global north and global south, and building mutual aid, direct action, and queer people power across borders. We are collectively creating new, comprehensive, and revolutionary ways of providing longterm support to our queer, asylum seeking siblings fleeing imperialism, while simultaneously fighting against imperialism itself. Help us sustain our work: givebutter.com/tassn
It’s national poetry month! Please enjoy these two poems about queerness and family by Blas Falconer and K-Ming Chang.
As always, a bit of beauty to send you on your way: another poem! I came across this last week and cannot stop thinking about it.
Image: An Instagram post from Poetry is Not a Luxury, the text of the poem ‘How to Not Be a Perfectionist’ by Molly Brodak: People are vivid/ and small/ and don’t live/ very long—
And that’s it until next week. Happy baking, eating, and reading to all of you!
I'm so happy to hear that about the Belc book! It's been on my radar, and I'm thrilled to hear you loved it. I'm considering preordering it, and I also put Exile and Pride on my TBR. I wasn't familiar with that one.