The Brotherhood of Joseph

This month marks the release of my new book, THE BROTHERHOOD OF JOSEPH: A Father’s Memoir of Infertility and Adoption in the 21st Century.

I would, of course, love nothing more than for the title to speak for itself, which for the most part I think it does; the subtitle anyway. But by way of welcome to this, the site created in conjunction with its release, let me say simply that Brotherhood is a book about the long, difficult, but ultimately very fortunate path that led my wife and me to our first child.

I wrote it for simple reasons: because I am a writer; because our story ended up being a good one, just from a storytelling perspective – emotional and comical, infuriating and exhilerating, if ultimately a lot more suspenseful than either my wife or I would have liked. But I also wrote it because it struck me that there something of a gap in the conversation that we as a culture find ourselves having about these topics: the new experience of infertility, and of adoption. Namely, the perspective of the husband.

There is a healthy amount of discussion out there reflecting the woman’s point of view, which stands to reason, women being such natural communicators of their own experience. For equally obvious reasons, the husband’s side tends not to get much air-play, and while I don’t consider me or my story to be all that typical -- so far as I can tell, no two adoption stories are alike (or infertility stories, or heck, fertility stories) -- I do suspect that the feelings that move us through them, of desperation, fear, anger, hope, doubt, and (if we should be so lucky) certainty, are – are not so very different.

So I offer this book for the oldest, least original, but maybe the most important, of reasons: to share my experience, and to assure anyone out there who might be going through something similar, that though at times it may not seem like it, though it may seem like you are alone out there, a lost pioneer in these particular depths of despair, you are not. We are all around you, and we know. We just, for some reason, don’t often say so.

Here's a Q and A about BROTHERHOOD currently posted over at Amazon