Appreciating Books

Sometimes reading a book is like spending a long sunny Sunday afternoon with an old friend, catching up and talking about Big Issues. When you come across that kind of book, especially when it's written by an old friend, you don't write a review of it,  you write an appreciation.

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I looked forward to reading Amie Klepnauer Miller's She Looks Just Like You: A Memoir of (Nonbiological Lesbian) Motherhood. The sub-title says a lot about what the book covers, and a lot about what I am not. I will never be a lesbian or a mother, biological or "other." But I know the couple and the child in the book. I remember some of the events and conversations in the book. And I genuinely like Amie, her partner Jane and their daughter Hanna. From the beginning, Klempnauer Miller hits the right note, sounding like a woman having a friendly, funny and meaningful discussion with an old friend. The occasional dialogue with Jane catches Jane's voice as surely as it does Amie's.

People read memoirs for different reasons, I suppose. We read some to live experiences that we will never have. I'll never be a chef in a New York restaurant (I rarely have even eaten in one), so Kitchen Confidential was an educational as well as entertaining read. We also read memoirs to relive the familiar through someone else's eyes. I read the first of William Mann's Jeff-and-Lloyd trilogy, The Men from the Boys, in about a day and a half. It was so like my life. It's a novel, officially, not a memoir. But it's autobiographical fiction, so I'm thinking of it in the same terms. The author is my contemporary, almost exactly, and he treats the eighties very nearly the way I lived it. (I had less sex and did fewer drugs probably.)

She Looks Just Like You pays off in more ways than one. Amie is a fan of the Big Issues discussions, best held when on long car trips in the midwest. There are plenty of Big Issues in this book: religion and faith, the legal status of glbt families, and the changes that adult relationship go through. These and more are discussed while Amie and Jane make the decision to have a baby, try to get pregnant, have Hanna, and endure the first year of her life.

A writer of grant proposals and articles for free newspapers Amie's writing is smooth and readable. She has a talent for boiling Big Issues down to their essentials and seeing them from multiple perspectives.

It's an odd thing, in the gay community, that family is both devalued and hypervalued. Because so many people have relationships with their biological families that are remote even on good days, there is a tendency to write off family as a loss, part of the price of coming out of the closet. ... When the family is not accepting, it is relatively easy to conclude that family doesn't really matter. Family becomes something to leave behind in Fargo or Trenton or Louisville.

Klempnauer Miller is also achingly honest in her portrait of how the arrival of baby Hanna changed the relationship between Hanna's two Mommies. 

Here is the truth: when Jane was pregnant, I found her irresistible. I loved her scent, her roundness, her exuberant possibility. I don't find postpartum Jane irresistible. I don't even find her attractive.

Eighteen months seems to be the adjustment time needed for a relationship to absorb a new baby. Amie thinks they can make it to eighteen months but wonders what's next. The book ends just after Hanna's first birthday, with Mama and Mommy not sure they are going to make it. Luckily, she includes an epilogue that assures the reader that Amie and Jane are still a Committed Couple. Not that I was worried.