Homodramatica: Family of Five

In 2011, shortly before the birth of her first daughter, novelist Kate Christie started a blog called Homodramatica. Over the next few years she would write about queer parenting, lesbian fiction, same-sex marriage, chronic illness, and the joys and challenges of raising three girls under the age of three. Now, in Homodramatica: Family of Five, Christie has reshaped her nonfiction writing into a book that tells the story of her growing family–and of her own growth over the same period. As Christie writes in her introduction, Each chapter presents a text-based snapshot of daily life for my wife, our daughters, and myself at a specific moment in time. Woven through this writerly scrapbook, as I’ve come to think of the collection, is the theme of gay marriage in the United States: What are the flash points in the cultural conversation about same-sex marriage? How does the debate impact parenting in general? And how does the political climate impact the life of our gay-married, same-sex parented family in particular? While some pieces in this collection will be familiar to readers of Christie’s blog, the book also contains content not previously published, including birth stories, parenting notes, and essays on DOMA and the 2015 SCOTUS gay marriage decision. As the saying goes, the personal is political. For one queer family caught up in the culture wars of the early twenty-first century, the two have often been inextricable.