The Family Way

This wonderful novel swept through my life like a sub-tropical Canadian breeze (!), melting all resistance and carrying me away. This is a powerful, complicated novel, and I don't think the book description here really does it justice. At times I felt the novel was too long, and too detailed about eve......more

I finished this over the weekend and I’m still ruminating over it. It’s deceptively simple, but there’s actually a whole lot to unpack and reflect upon. So many takeaways and lingering moments. And honestly, the book was such a warm place to spend my time. There’s something so undeniably ordinary and......more

Diraddo is one of those classic writers whose command of structure is both effortless and exacting, no resonance left unexplored, yet allowing his stripped-clean prose (its similes sparing and sharp, its cadences natural) to breathe long, mind-clearing breaths. Matched, as it is, with thoroughly mod......more

In The Family Way, Christopher DiRaddo uses ties to gay classics like Ethan Morden's Buddies series and Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City to tell a story of gay life in the 21st century. Paul is a 40-year old gay man living in Montreal in 2011 with his younger, late-twenties boyfriend, Michael, hi......more

A great read! Paul at mid-life is asked by his best friend, a dyke, to be a surrogate for her child. Not only does Christopher DiRaddo, a seminal figure in the queer lit community of Montreal, check the pulse on gay life in the 21st century, i.e., family redefined, he tells the story with compassion......more