{"product_id":"one-big-happy-family-isbn-9781594484377","title":"One Big Happy Family","description":"\u003cb\u003eMore important and timely than ever--a collection of illuminating essays on the shifting definition of the modern American family. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Edited by bestselling writer Rebecca Walker, this fascinating exploration of today's American family features essays by prominent voices such as Z.Z. Packer, Dan Savage, Min Jin Lee, Asha Bandele, Neal Pollack, and others, on subjects such as open marriages, polyamory, single motherhood, parenting a disabled child, home schooling, and more. An unabashed celebration of love in all its diversity and complexity, \u003ci\u003eOne Big Happy Family\u003c\/i\u003e offers a multitude of engaging pictures of modern American families.Rebecca Walker has received numerous awards and accolades for her writing and activism. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and publications; in addition to the international bestseller \u003ci\u003eBlack, White, and Jewish\u003c\/i\u003e, her anthology \u003ci\u003eTo Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism \u003c\/i\u003ehas become a standard text in gender studies courses around the world. A popular speaker at universities and in business settings, Walker teaches the art of memoir at workshops and writing conferences internationally.\u003cp\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTitle Page\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCopyright Page\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIntroduction\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 1. - And Then We Were Poly Jenny Block\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 2. - Woman Up asha bandele\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 3. - The Enemy Within Dan Savage\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 4. - Foreign Relations Suzanne Kamata\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 5. - Counting on Cousins Amy Anderson\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 6. - The Look ZZ Packer\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 7. - Like Family Min Jin Lee\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 8. - Daddy Donoring Antonio Caya\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 9. - Two Red Lines Susan McKinney de Ortega\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 10. - My First Husband Liza Monroy\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 11. - Home Alone Together Neal Pollack\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 12. - Love, Money, and the Unmarried Couple Judith Levine\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 13. - Unassisted Sasha Hom\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 14. - Sharing Madison Dawn Friedman\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 15. - Half the Work, All the Fun Marc and Amy Vachon\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 16. - How Homeschooling Made Our Family More of What We Wanted It to Be  ...\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 17. - Till Life Do Us Part Meredith Maran\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChapter 18. - This Old House Rebecca Barry\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAcknowledgements\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCredits\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAbout the Contributors\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eby Rebecca Walker\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBlack, White \u0026amp; Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBaby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eedited by Rebecca Walker\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cbr\u003eWhat Makes a Man: 22 Writers Imagine the Future\u003cp\u003eRIVERHEAD BOOKS \u003cbr\u003ePublished by the Penguin Group \u003cbr\u003ePenguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin \u003cbr\u003eGroup (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada \u003cbr\u003e(a division of Pearson Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, \u003cbr\u003eEngland Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books \u003cbr\u003eLtd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, \u003cbr\u003eAustralia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, \u003cbr\u003e11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), \u003cbr\u003e67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson \u003cbr\u003eNew Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, \u003cbr\u003eRosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePenguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eCopyright © 2009 by Rebecca Walker\u003cp\u003eAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or \u003cbr\u003edistributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do \u003cbr\u003enot participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation \u003cbr\u003eof the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. \u003cbr\u003ePublished simultaneously in Canada\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePage 257 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne big happy family : 18 writers talk about polyamory, open adoption, mixed marriage, \u003cbr\u003ehousehusbandry, single motherhood, and other realities of truly modern love \/ edited and with an \u003cbr\u003eintroduction by Rebecca Walker. \u003cbr\u003ep. cm.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eeISBN : 978-1-101-01143-0\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e1. Family—United States. 2. Social values—United States. I. Walker, Rebecca, date. \u003cbr\u003eHQ734. \u003cbr\u003e306.850973—dc22\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhile the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIntroduction\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by other people’s families. My own family was fragmented and haunted by unfulfilled longings. My parents came from different races. They divorced. They began relationships with others. They had children with others. They lived three thousand miles apart. They had wildly divergent worldviews. They did not communicate often or, from my perspective, well. As I shuttled back and forth across the country to spend time with each parent, navigated the murky waters of a multiracial identity, and struggled to negotiate tricky relationships with my stepmother and half-siblings, I didn’t feel my parents were fully aware of the implications of their decisions. Though they may have tried, they weren’t able to ensure my emotional well-being in the midst of their vicissitudes. My parents loved each other deeply, but they never figured out how to actually be a family.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI can’t say for sure why this was so. My parents both came from less than idyllic families, which may have had something to do with their difficulty charting a steadier course for ours. But my parents were also part of a larger generational movement that rebelled against the traditional nuclear family.  When they met in the early 1960s, divorce was stigmatized and not easy to obtain. Interracial marriage was illegal in most states, birth control just barely available, and abortion hidden away in back alleys. Women were just beginning to enter the workforce in large numbers. Homosexuality was classified as deviant, a psychiatric disorder. A family was expected to live in one community, in one house, for decades. Their children attended the local public or parochial school. Emotional subtleties were regarded with suspicion, and circumscribed “family values” went, for the most part, unquestioned.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThough you’d have to ask them for particulars, I think it’s safe to say that my parents identified this paradigm as part of a larger system responsible for the oppression of women and people of color, and the repression of human sexuality and potential overall. Thus armed, they gave themselves permission to smash the paradigm to bits by doing the exact opposite of what was expected, which translated loosely into doing whatever they wanted or, perhaps more accurately, whatever they could piece together. This meant marrying when it was illegal to do so, cultivating both of their careers, and moving from one city to another as opportunities arose. It also meant divorcing without lawyers or acrimony, devising a custody plan that moved me between their houses, three thousand miles and many worlds apart, every two years. It meant not talking to each other for more than ten minutes, up until the day I graduated from high school.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhether this chain of events transpired by happenstance or design, the result was the same. Plans were made, and then abandoned. Subsequent complications were left largely  unresolved. I floundered in the midst of a series of upheavals, watched a popular television show about a white, “blended” family called the Brady Bunch with longing, and was certain that everyone else’s family was more coherent and stable, more “family-like,” than my own. I tested my hypothesis by spending an inordinate amount of time at the homes of my friends, convinced I could find the missing ingredient, the rarefied glue that coalesced seemingly random individuals into indivisible clans.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen I was ten, I stayed nights in a tiny apartment with a friend whose mother slept the entire time I visited—the only hours she didn’t have to work. In seventh grade, I spent weekends with my best friend amidst shaky, broken-down stairs, entire walls of peeling paint, and an angry father who punished his children for the tiniest indiscretion. At thirteen, I was a regular fixture at the house of a friend whose dad smoked what was known in the neighborhood as “the best fucking pot in the state.” We chanted along to “We don’t need no education” in his cave-like study, oblivious to the irony that he was a teacher at the high school his daughter and I would eventually attend.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI also visited families that didn’t skirt the edge of acceptable middle class-dom. I met, for instance, a lovely family on a bus tour of Ireland. Everyone in the family had names starting with the letter \u003ci\u003eS\u003c\/i\u003e, and they invited me to stay at their midcentury modern house in upstate New York. I found it a little dull, but charming nonetheless. I felt the same way about a nice, middle-class family—the father was a doctor, the mother a schoolteacher—living next door. Their young daughter and I shoveled spoonfuls of coveted (but verboten  at my house) Marshmallow Fluff into our mouths, and romped through each floor of her Marimekko’d house with abandon.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBy the time I graduated from high school, I had concluded that some families were like mine—they broke the rules and made up new ones as they went along, with hit-or-miss results. And some families were not like mine—they hewed to a more traditional path that appeared more stable, but lacked the frisson of experimentation. The first group explored new territory, but couldn’t determine a workable cartography for the future. The latter followed a decades-old map, dangerously oblivious to tectonic shifts occurring beneath the surface.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBy the time I had my son fifteen years later, I had made several attempts to create a family of my own. I winged it, searching for stability but stumbling over patterns of intimacy that seemed built into my DNA. There was a relationship with a sexy musician who may or may not have been on drugs. There was a guy who lived six thousand miles and twenty cultural galaxies away. My high school sweetheart followed me across the country for my first two years of college, but my working night and day on a documentary one hot summer in a borrowed condo on the Upper East Side of Manhattan ripped our relationship to shreds. Then I fell for a guy who was kind of right for me. But he came from an intact family and his parents had pictures of him and his sisters all over the walls of the house they’d lived in for twenty-five years, and every time I slept over (in a separate bedroom, of course), I felt like an insecure freak from a broken home. Which eventually made him crazy and swear, to  my face, that he would never again go out with anyone whose parents were divorced.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt was a lot of fun.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSo when my son was born and I saw him lying strapped to a board under an oxygen tent, unable to breathe on his own because he’d had a difficult birth with all sorts of complications, I realized I had to get my proverbial stuff together. Decisions had to be made. Promises had to be kept. I couldn’t just shake my head and say I tried my best if he told me one day I had been an awful mother and he wanted—no, needed—to live in the desert in a tent with his pet iguana. I listened to his raspy breathing and let the reality of responsibility wash over me. It was now or never, I thought to myself. Romantic love doth not a family make. Bogus, manufactured ideas of following your bliss can lead you over a cliff without a parachute. Make some sane, considered decisions and live with them for a while. If they don’t work, reevaluate and change the plan. Make sure the boy doesn’t suffer unnecessarily in the process. Take responsibility. Grow up.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhich was also a lot of fun, and, given my track record, as likely as gathering odds and ends from my kitchen, building a rocket ship, and flying to the moon. To my credit, though, by the time I went into labor, I had learned a few things. I knew I wasn’t willing to follow any doctrine, including “attachment parenting,” blindly. I was certain I didn’t want to “just do what felt right in the moment” again, either. I knew I had to create a hybrid modality, a stable but adaptive platform for family life. Like the operating system on my computer, it had to be sophisticated enough to handle several  programs at once without crashing, or worse, blowing the motherboard.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI decided to put the family-watching skills I developed as a child to use by editing a collection of essays about contemporary families that balance the traditional and the counter-cultural, the cliché and the experimental. I jumped into the project because I wasn’t alone in my search to be both authentic and sane. My friends and colleagues had also recovered from childhoods full of too much or too little, and were looking to fashion an adulthood out of wisdom gained. Hours and hours of their lives were devoted to researching and integrating elements that could make their crazy, complex twenty-first-century families work. My book would be the ultimate reference book for all of us, I thought, a modern anthology version of Dr. Spock.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Riverhead Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303362842853,"sku":"NP9781594484377","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781594484377.jpg?v=1767734153","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/one-big-happy-family-isbn-9781594484377","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}