It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

I never intended this to be a political blog. Still less did I intend it to be a blog about marriage, of all things. But sometimes you get seized by a political moment. It’s made writing my novel hard, although I am about to land my narrator in McCarthy-era Los Angeles, so maybe I can fuel all of these feelings right into the story. Never thought of that!

First, let me say that I am OVERJOYED about Obama’s election. This is past-due and gives me a renewed faith in this country. I really didn’t think we’d be willing to elect an intelligent man president . . .

I am so angry that I even have to think about the probable passage of Prop. 8 and the lawsuits these reactionary people have already filed to annul my marriage. This is a time of celebration and hope, and I am sitting here wiping crap pie off of my face.

So I want to talk about the practice of writing. Writing every day. Whether you feel like it or not. Whether you like how it’s going or not. Whether you have time, energy, inspiration or a clue. Much like parenting, this is the only way to develop a relationship with writing that will sustain it and you over the long haul. I have not done this always, and for that reason, I have accomplished more as an editor and a teacher than as a writer. But in the times when I do it–and this is one of them–I break through the romance of writing and take it up as a responsibility (to myself, because who else cares, really, at this point in the drafting?).

Imagining being a writer and actually writing are two such different experiences as to have almost no commonality. It’s like the first year of being a parent (at least when you have two): you have no time or capability for understanding or analyzing your experience. You are just living it, moment after moment, diaper after diaper, feeding after feeding, nap after nap, story after story, meal after meal, laundry load after laundry load, grocery shop after grocery shop . . . Wanting children is all about desire and imagination and feelings (sometimes hard feelings, when it isn’t going well). Having children, at least at first, has very little to do with any of that (except when the hormones through you over the emotional edge).

And yet, having children has connected me to myself and a sense of being human that has transformed me. It’s not a splashy transformation. Few people even know about it, I would guess, since I don’t have time or energy to telephone people anymore, and when you meet me at the park, I am running five different directions at once and conversations are choppy at best. Anyway, I think this is true of writing, too, and I’m not sure how I feel about it: paragraph after paragraph, attempt after attempt, each sentence structure, the lousy voice of judgment harping on in the background while the fingers move and move, the mind hoping for some combination of complete, transcendent brilliance and extra time left at the end of the evening to watch Californication.

Maybe changing the world works the same way. Conversation after conversation, rally after rally, defeat after defeat, the highs, the lows, a kind of daily commitment to believing that things can be other than they are, that things should be other than they are. One day, you look up, and there is a stack of manuscript pages in the printer, a grown-up person who was once your little jumping bean, and a President of the United States of America, whose own parents, like my sons’ parents, could not have gotten married at the time of his birth in 1961 in sixteen states in the Union.

This morning, Angie went down to our local freeway overpass to hold NO ON 8 signs, alongside the imported yes on 8ers. The boys and I started to clean the house, and then we got a call from Angie that the yessers had huge signs strung all along the fencing, and she was there with only one other person.

So I called someone and she called someone and then I called my mom. Then I changed diapers and went off to drop the boys at a park with my mom and join Angie. By the time I got there, there were just two yes guys and their one big yellow sign, and several older women (my mom’s age) had shown up and were pressing a no on 8 sign against the fence, with the wind pushing back at them. I held a big tarp sign with a woman who teaches at Los Positas Community College. She told me that many of her students were voting for the first time today.

It was freezing on the overpass, and while we got a lot of thumbs up and honking from the west-to-east side, the folks going the other direction–who had the yellow yes sign to react to as well–seemed a lot more conservative.

I found myself feeling so angry. I wanted to turn to those yes on 8 men and say, “What does it feel like to be on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of family and the wrong side of Christianity??” They seemed more jovial than I–sort of that “we’re all in this together” feeling that you can get when everyone is pressing signs against the wind, and streams of traffic are gushing under your feet, shaking the cement structure on which you stand. I did not share their joviality, perhaps because this is my family and my marriage we are voting on.

This could be the most momentous, historic occasion of my entire life, past and future, if things go my way. If things go really, really wrong, I’m going to feel like getting out of here, though some folks on Talk of the Nation today suggested that this was an unsportsman-like attitude. In general, my slogan is that of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”  But I do want to keep my loved ones on one side of that line for as long as possible.

Meanwhile, I’ve pounded out 6017 words on my novel in the past three days. (I will start chugging on my next 1667-2000  words when I finish this blog.)  I always say that it is easier to write than to think about writing, but of course it’s easiest of all to do neither. At the same time, I get irritable and draggy when I stop writing for long enough. My father used to say, “If only coffee tasted the way it smells . . . ” (Angie says that it does, but then she is on a slippery coffee slope.) I wish that writing felt like reading feels.

The closest I get to that is when I just keep writing, past the extreme judgments of my inner editor (how come my inner editor is in there with my inner child and she still has time and brain power to be so harsh and detailed? Shouldn’t she be changing diapers or something?), past the hiccups and the slow, uphill inclines, past the raging uncertainty . . . and did I mention the judgments?

I think critics, inner and otherwise, are a little like yes on 8ers. They are angry and negative about something that really had nothing to do with them. There are, for example, a certain number of people who are really angry about NaNoWriMo. They say that it brings thousands of crappy manuscripts into a world overrun with manuscripts and makes thousands of people believe that they are writers when they are not. And the people opposed to gay marriage seem to feel that marriage is unravelling if all these extra people get to get married, as if we are producing shoddy relationships in a world overrun with relationships . . . Okay, I might be working too hard or not hard enough at this metaphor. I am sugar-filled and caffine-walloped and sleep-deprived, so I hope you can bear with me.

What I am trying to say is that people writing crappy manuscripts and people creating unorthodox relationships are NOT A THREAT to the establishment. People who write crappy manuscripts are more likely to buy published books and to read them well. People who are getting up together each day to figure out how to make breakfast, get everyone dressed and out the door, keep the house clean and the laundry done, make a living and have quality time with the children and each other are not ripping at the fabric of traditional marriage.

One literary-political note. In plots, when things are looking really good for the hero and you’re fifteen, twenty minutes from the end of the movie or, say, a quarter of the way to an eighth of the way to the end of the book, what are you thinking?

You’re thinking, in the immortal words of my sons, Uh oh. We know the rhythms of plot so well when we are consuming it (creating it is a different story for some of us). It does not bode well for our guy when things are looking up too far out from the end. And it’s been going well for Obama for a while now. Better and better. I hope that real life will do as it often does and rebutt our understanding of plot and just soar right on to victory.

Because it felt incredible to walk around Whole Foods today, grocery shopping, and look at all the people who populate my world and think, “We just might be electing an African-American man president today.” I want my boys to come to consciousness with a man of color in the White house. I want them to think that if it was ever another way, that was a long time ago, back in the last century . . . Besides which, our Cobra insurance coverage runs out next year, and it would be great to have an alternative to Kaiser . . .

I have yet one more undeveloped thought. As you know, we’ve never made any kind of reparations to the many Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in this country. I know that Obama may not be one of these, except possibly on his mother’s side, since we are all quite a lot more mixed up than we pretend. But it occurs to me that all this fear of “redistribution of the wealth” taps into a national knowledge that the original distribution of the wealth was acquired by theft and murder, and that a Black president might look at reparations in an entirely different way. I think the fear of redistribution of the wealth is a fear of honest reparations being raised as a real issue–some seriously messed up mortages coming due with a big balloon payment.

But walking around today, I felt excited. I felt like we might be able to do something far beyond reparations, and move right on over to fairness and representation and something that actually looks like democracy.

[NOTE: The GIVEAWAY is located in my Oct. 21 blog, below.]

Lately, my sons have taken to picking up the books I am reading. Leo seems particularly drawn to A Spot of Bother (by Mark Haddon), which I have floating around the bed in hardback. “That’s Mommy’s book,” I say.

He looks through the pages.

“There are no pictures,” I tell him. “The pictures are in the words.”

This is a key point in writing. It’s not that we move beyond pictures; it’s that we find them in the lines that we read. I am working on this is my class right now: you have all these wonderful ideas about your characters and your plot. How, when you sit down to write at a fast pace next month, will you turn those thoughts into pictures, into scene, into physical actions and details? This is probably the number one issue I tackle in editing, too. I want to see see see (taste, touch, smell and hear) the world you are giving me. I don’t want to have to trust you and your understanding of the characters and their choices. I want the evidence laid out before me so that I can decide what’s going on for myself.

Here’s an example: your friend is dating someone new. She tells you about him. Do you really want to know if she thinks he’s nice or smart or considerate? No, you want to know if he arrived on time and where he took her to eat and what he looks like and what they talked about and why he and his ex broke-up . . . You want no abstract ideas. You want physical evidence. CSI style.

There’s another quote whose originator I don’t know: “The more he talked of his honesty, the faster we counted our spoons.”

Let’s face it: We don’t trust people’s opinions of themselves. They’re telling, but not in a one-to-one translation of idea to fact.

Scenes from a wedding:

We have seconds to spare when Angie, the boys, their stroller, snacks, diapers, my extra shoes and alternate outfit and I roll up to the San Francisco City Hall. The over-loaded stroller goes through a special gate, but we, in our fancy clothes, go through the metal detectors. The building is paved in marble, with statues of mayors scattered throughout. We dash along, past the grand staircase and under the chandeliers. We wait in a line, fill out a form, are given a number (A110), and wait in another line. Quickly, we are called forward to present our IDs. The woman takes a look at mine and hands in back. “This expired yesterday.” Yesterday! My birthday. Of course.

Our options: go to the SF DMV and try to get a renewal or drive home and hope that my passport is where it should be and is not expired. Well, you’ve been to the DMV. I take my long white dressed self and drive back to Berkeley. I pray to the parking goddess that my passport–unlike anything else in the house–in where it should be. I listen to the radio. I think about the class I am teaching tonight. I receive an angry call from the place where we’d made a reservation for lunch.

We are getting married this day because it is the very last appointment available before Nov. 4, and on Nov. 4, there is the possibility that we will no longer have the right to be married. In fact, Oct. 22, 2008 is the four year anniversary of my father’s death and the day after my birthday when my license expires and a day I teach at 6 p.m. and we haven’t had time to plan anything or create a real wedding or even to learn–as I did as soon as we signed up for it–that I really wanted all of that. But there is a ticking time bomb: if this doesn’t happen now, it may never happen. And for the sake of my children, not to mention my relationship, it needs to happen.

I rush into the house, slide a box of toys and a folded rug back from where they’ve been pushed in front of my filing cabinet. I kneel down in my white dress and fling open the top drawer and being to file through the neat tabs that someone helped me put together a couple of years ago but which I rarely actually use. Bills and Insurance and this and that and then Official documents. There are the boys’ birth certificates. I lift them out and there, at the bottom of the folder, is my passport. I fumble it open and look closely: it expires in 2013.

We meet again at City Hall and feed the boys some apples and plums babyfood. Some San Francisco friends show up. Shilla brings a beautiful bouquet for me and a boutonniere for Angie. Katia brings lavender that smells wonderful, and strongly enough to cover the smell Leo brings right as our second number (B263) is called. Thea comes from work nearby, and brings joy and tears at all the right moments. Jennifer brings a fancy camera and her son Jacko, who had to leave chess early, and who consents to bear the rings.

A woman named Noni marries us. She wears the officiants’ outfit of long black robes and her head is shaved. She looks like a Buddhist monk, as if we are being married my a young Pema Chodrun. She zips us up the elevator to the rotunda. Charlie hates the elevator and Leo wants “more” elevator. Instead, we stand in a circle of darker marble, Angie and I. Charlie is on her back in the Ergo, and Angie has to bounce throughout the ceremony to keep Charlie on this side of the contented/ hysterical line.

Then Noni is speaking, about grace and love and commitment, about the honor she has of being vested by the State of California with the power to declare us “spouses for life.” And we?

We do!

It was rushed and crazy, but in that moment, I was fully present. I looked into Angie’s beautiful blue eyes, and I heard every word I was being asked, and I could agree to all of it, willingly. Really, what more could I ask?

But for purposes of today’s literary lesson, I want to bring you back to that moment when I did not have the correct ID and this was possibly the last possible chance to get married ever. This is what is known as a ticking time bomb, something in the plot that is set to go off at a certain time. It raises the stakes, ups the ante and puts all kinds of pressure on the obstacles that create a story.

When you get married? Check the expiration on your ID and bring an extra one just in case. But when you write your novel? Make sh*t happen, make it matter, and make sure it will explode, turn coaches into pumpkins and horses into rats, just at midnight and not a second later. And make sure that I, your reader, can see it with my own eyes. Don’t make me trust you. I’m saving that for my spouse!

VOTE NO ON PROP. 8

I attended a lovely wedding reception on Saturday, and ended up talking with some of the other guests about how useful it would be if they did start teaching marriage skills in kindergarten. Maybe the divorce rate would not be skyrocketing. It seemed to us, in our conversation, that the curriculum would not really have to separate the lesson into “gay” and “straight” marriage. For one thing, if there is any occasion (besides Halloween) where straight people have adopted costume and camp to better effect, I don’t know what it is.  But you decide:

Gay Marriage: A Kindergarten Lesson Plan

1) Marriage is a relationship between two adult, consenting partners. It is ideal if these people know themselves well and even like themselves. We also hope they really like each other, at least to start.

2) Marriage is a framework for sustaining love, family, and a lot of logistics, such as bills, housecleaning, and (sometimes) childcare. In this special Gay Marriage lesson, we are going to learn reflective listening, calendar management, and checkbook balancing.

3) A significant period of courtship is recommended before embarking on your marriage journey. If you expect your partner to change (even just to meet his or her amazing but unrealized potential), GIVE IT UP before you marry. Marriage is about loving a person just as he or she is. (This does not mean you cannot negotiate about the disposal of dirty laundry or whose turn it is to change diapers.)

4) When attending a gay wedding, see if you can find a card that does not have animals on it. With the dearth of appropriate cards, animal themes tend to dominate.

5) In our lesson on the history of Gay Marriage, we are going to have to talk about the Catholic church, which used to perform them some hundreds of years ago. Please have your parents sign the permission slip that will allow us to discuss this oppressive institution that many of them do not support, believe in or practice.

P.S. This week, Angie and I are going to elope . . . in case enough of you don’t VOTE NO ON PROP. 8 . . . and they take away our right to be married.

Tomorrow’s blog: Easy peasy GIVEAWAY for writers and people who want to write, plus more on books, writing and that sort of thing.

I am in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, typing on the computer, while my mother-in-law cooks dinner and Angie kisses the boys’ little feet. This sentence, I suppose, is what strikes fear in the hearts of the out-of-state Mormons who are flooding the supporters of Proposition 8 with funds–25 million dollars so far, to be exact. Somehow, my having a mother-in-law (cooking dinner) and a father-in-law (out hunting!) and a spouse (female and monitoring two boys opening kitchen cabinets) and two sons (exploring Grandpa and Nana’s house) shakes the very foundations of their marriages. All marriages. Except, I guess, my own.

And it is National Coming Out Day.

When I graduated from my M.F.A. program, Ian McKellen (Sir Ian to you) gave the commencement address. (Is that what it is called? Angie and my mother-in-law and I cannot quite agree.) Anyway, he had come out relatively recently, given his age (this was in the mid-nineties and he’s sixty-nine now. You do the math; this is a blog about writing). And he said, Come out, in every way that you can. And support your gay and lesbian family members so that they can come out. There I was, with my whole New York family–cousins of my father who, like my father, were born in the 1920s–and they were being extolled by a world-famous, brilliant actor to come out and to support me in coming out. It was splendid.

If I was worth my salt as a blogger, I would find and scan the photograph of Sir Ian and me (and my partner at the time) on the steps of the School of the Arts. But I am a writer, so I will just tell you that I wore a blue flowered dress, and Sir Ian and my former partner wore suits, and behind us bricks lead up to the stone steps and huge glass doors, and my lipstick is a bit overly bright red, but I am twenty-five and the world owes me a living.

Well, no. That was my father: when, at twenty-one, he graduated from medical school, he sat back at his commencement ceremony and thought, “Now the world owes me a living.” When I earned my M.F.A. in writing, I had no such illusions. But I will venture to say that the world owes me some civil rights.

Here are a couple of things I want to say to people who oppose my right to marry on the basis that it somehow threatens their own marriages or notion of marriage: if homosexuality cannot be stamped out by death, the threat of death, ostracization, beatings, derision, exclusion, legal and religious persecution, an absence of representation, and so forth, I really don’t think heterosexuality is in grave danger from gay marriage. And if your kid sees my family and learns something new is possible, the life saved may be your kid’s.

Meanwhile, if you are a writer (or a reader or, really, anyone): come out, in any way necessary for you. Be vivid. Be quirky. Be honest. Be strange. Admit that you want to write. Admit that you love this particular book or that particular song. Confess your joy at sitting in the park with someone who makes you laugh. You know that your capacity for love, like mine, extends beyond the bounds of what you’ve been taught or offered, that it is an enormous force that can create sonnets and children and some very awkward voice mail messages. Say so.

Happy Coming Out Day!

To donate to NO on PROP 8 — and counter those out-of-state Mormons, click here. Spread the word!

One good reason to vote NO on Prop. 8 (which would take away the right that gay men and lesbians now have to marry in the state of California) is that it’s putting an enormous amount of pressure on some of us to get married before election day in November, in order that we might be “grandfathered in” even if the right to marry gets overturned. How crazy is that?

Another reason is that it’s always nice to be on the side of social justice, civil rights and history. It just looks better. Your grandchildren aren’t going to think twice about gay people getting married, but they will look askance at those who opposed their right to do so.

Let’s say that it is true–somehow, though I can’t for the life of me imagine how it would be true–that my marriage weakens other, heterosexual marriages. Maybe some woman sees my spouse in the park playing with the kids while I sit, at a nearby picnic table, typing on my computer. She says to herself, “It is not even Sunday afternoon, and that woman’s spouse is playing with the kids. That is so unfair. I want to take away her right to be married to that person. And if I can’t do that, I want to go home and pick a fight with my own spouse, who never goes to the park on a Wednesday (most likely because he’s busy earning more money than I could in the same job).” So begins the fighting, the acrimony . . . and soon it’s divorce time. All because of my little lesbian marriage. Okay. I can imagine it . . . sort of . . .

Let’s say that’s true. Even if it’s true that granting me my civil rights threatens your marriage . . . drum roll . . . that is not a good reason not to grant me those rights. Have you ever read “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. LeGuin? You can find it online . . http://harelbarzilai.org/words/omelas.txt

It’s a powerful piece of writing that imagines a utopian society based on the suffering of only one child. LeGuin’s narrator speculates about how hard it is for us to imagine happy people who are not childlike and naive. The narrator nearly negotiates with the reader as to how Omelas’ society would function: drugs, perhaps? Religion but no clergy; a sense of victory but no soldiers. Festivals are taking place, some Renaissance in feel, some more Summer of Love. (The story was published in 1974.)

Finally, as if to make one last effort to convince us of the existence of Omelas, the narrator tells us about the child, locked in what amounts to a janitor’s closet, ignored, enfeebled. Every once in a while, the door to the damp room opens and someone throws food in, while more people look on without speaking.

"If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of
that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted,
that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done,
in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and
delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those
are the terms." (quotes are drawn from the web site given)

LeGuin has a vivid description of the rage and disgust of the children of Omelas when they learn about the suffering child upon whom their happiness and the beauty of their society rest, and then about the way they digest their feelings, and “their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and accept it.”

However, there is one more thing that the narrator has to describe. From time to time one of the adolescents, after seeing the child for the first or second time, or one of the adults of a sudden, will leave Omelas, and walk away alone.

“The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot descibe it at all. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

Rereading the story for the upteenth time (I’ve even taught it before), I feel as if I understand it better than ever. Perhaps it is because I have found myself accepting the “terrible justice of reality,” trading it for youthful idealism and constant frustration. Perhaps it is because I am attempting to use the story to make the argument to those who believe that marriage is a beautiful and perfect institution built for a man and a woman that they should walk away from their utopia if it necessarily rests on the unhappiness of my people, on the pain of my sons, on the limitations of my civil rights.

LeGuin suggests that the place where people refuse to build their joy on the suffering of even one other person is a place harder to imagine than that joyful utopia, but if you are willing to set out in that direction, you will find your footsteps sure.

Read about Prop. 8:

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=California_Proposition_8_(2008)

http://www.noonprop8.com/home

as well as countless “Christian” web sites and reports of out-of-state money pouring in to defeat Prop. 8.

Last week, Angie and the boys and I were driving around delivering the lasagnas that Angie had made for various families with wee babes. This is something that had never occurred to us to do prior to having children. We had time to sit in cafes and read Savage Love and Real Astrology, but we did not make and deliver lasagnas. We lived in a world where if you didn’t have the time or energy to cook, you went out to eat. If you didn’t have a lot of money, you could always get a burrito. Now we have the one-year-old (as of tomorrow! Happy Birthday wee Charles!) and the 16-month-old, and damn if we don’t appreciate the food that was brought to us by sundry family and friends, and that, from time to time, my mother will still bring if we order ahead, and that Angie’s mother will cook if we drive up to Sonoma to visit. And we make an effort to welcome new people into their new families with food. It’s a good way to usher people in, and a good way to usher people out. Oh yes, and we delivered cookies, too.

The point, however, is that as I drove, Angie read to me from the latest issue of The Atlantic, which had come in the mail just before we left. There is an article by Andrew Sullivan in it called “My Big, Fat, Straight Wedding.” I just had a technological break-through and found the article online, here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200809/gay-marriage

We got all choked up reading it. Of course, I loved that, intonationally, Andrew Sullivan sounds exactly like Angie, at least when Angie is reading him aloud. But also the article talked about how there’s been a shift in how gays are perceived: instead of homosexuality being a disorder, it is a defining characteristic. I am not going to rehearse his whole train of thought, because there is the link and all. What mattered to me was the idea that we are now, legally, individuals before we are gay people. And that that legal tidbit actually matches my own feeling about myself and my life.

I remember being stoned on a nude beach with someone I loved, and both of us just laughing about the fact that we were gay. It seemed sort of unbelievable as an identity but not because of the set of behaviors and pleasures we personally attached to it. In other words, we adored each other and adored adoring each other, but how funny that that made us gay. I see that without being stoned on a nude beach, the resonance and humor is not coming through. It’s just that I’ve puzzled about what “made me gay.” Angie likes to make jokes about this–mostly at her mother’s expense, as in, you packed me off with peanut butter sandwiches on rice crackers for lunch and that’s why I’m gay. I wonder what people who knew me before I came out think about it–if they have stories about how they knew or didn’t know or wondered or would never have thought it in a million years. I just have never had a personal narrative where the kernel of who I am is gay.

So as my beloved and our sons and I drove around delivering organic lasagnas with handmade whole wheat pasta to three lesbian families–one with a newborn, one with a two-month-old, and one with a four-month-old who is sick in the hospital–I felt the thrill of hearing this idea again: that I am a person who wants to marry another person who is a woman. Yes, it is true that almost all the people I’ve wanted to marry have been women, at least at the time, so some sort of meaning accrues there.

This is not about not being “out.” I come out all the time, now. Because people are always seeing me with my boys and asking, “Are they twins?” To which I reply, “They are four months apart in age.” At this point, the boys look enough alike or are so obviously both mine, that people tend to knit brows and mumble to themselves until I say, “My partner gave birth to one and gave birth to the other,” thus outing us as a two-uterus family. At The Little Farm. At Totland. At Whole Foods. And I love coming out in this way, because it is so peculiar to us (and a few other families). It generally doesn’t remind people of their one cousin in New Jersey or their friend who moved to San Francisco. It may remind them of the couple they know who has twins, but they can’t gloss the twist we add, either. Most of the people I’m having this conversation with are mothers, and what they want to know is, what is it like being pregnant at the same time. Or they say, you have your hands full–and then we are back in mutual territory.

As a half-Jew on the “wrong” side who grew up half of the time in the fancy Berkeley hills and half of the time  on the “other side of the tracks,” just below San Pablo, I have never fit comfortably into an identity. I have always been afraid of the foreclosure that comes when people think they know who you are because of . . . who you are. Or who you seem to be. And yet I long for the comfort of exactly that sense of community, of being known.

I guess this is one of the reasons I love fiction. As a reader, I identify with any sympathetic character who unfolds well before me. I become all sorts of protagonists if they are specific enough, particular enough, to come to life somewhere between the page and my imagination. Somehow, gay marriage and its attendant civil rights boil down to this for me: are Americans good enough readers to be willing to experience happy endings different from the ones they live?

There may be another way to say this: can people learn to deliver lasagnas to new families even if they’ve never brought a child on board in their own?