The Velveteen Father: An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: The Designated Daughter
'Mommy,' he said. In the summer after his third birthday, Erez started asking for his mother, or at any rate for something he referred to by that name. 'I'm going outside to find Mommy,' he informed us one day, quite jauntily, as if he were announcing

Being a parent was not a high priority-or even much of a likelihood-for acclaimed journalist and novelist Jesse Green. Yet when Green, at the age of thirty-seven, fell in love with a man who had recently adopted a baby boy, fatherhood suddenly fell into his lap. Now in this warm, humorous, deeply personal book, Green recounts the unexpected journey he and his partner traveled together on the road to parenthood.

In becoming the father-or rather one of the fathers-of Erez, Green faced challenges familiar to all parents, from the first bath to the first tooth, along with a host of dilemmas unique to his situation. As Green discovered, even in blasé New York City, reactions to his unconventional family ranged from the funny to the frightening, the unaccepting to the all-embracing. The Velveteen Father is a moving record of the transformative effects parenthood can have on people who least expect to become parents- and of how we are repeatedly made anew by the love of children who need us.

Jesse Green is a much-anthologized, award-winning journalist and a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine; his articles have also appeared in The New Yorker, New York, The Washington Post, Premiere, GQ, Philadelphia, Mirabella, and Out. His novel, O Beautiful, was called "one of the best first novels of the year" by Entertainment Weekly.

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