The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family by Dan Savage

read by Paul Michael Garcia

Published in 2005, The Commitment is a snapshot of a time in our country’s life as well as famed sex-and-relationship-advice columnist Dan Savage’s life. A decade before June 26, 2015, when the United States Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage and legalized it everywhere, there was still a lot of very contentious debate on the topic—not least among those most directly affected by it.

For example, there was Dan Savage, his boyfriend Terry Miller, and their son, DJ, aged 6 at the time. None of them wanted Dan and Terry to get married. At least, Terry doesn’t want to get married; not because he isn’t committed to Dan and their son, but because he doesn’t want to “act straight.” He’d rather they get matching “property of” tattoos. 

And DJ is against it because, in his six-year-old worldview, boys don’t marry each other. (Never mind quite a bit of evidence to the contrary.) Plus he doesn’t want to be there when his dads say mushy things to each other and kiss in front of everyone. But he wants cake. If there’s going to be a wedding, he’s definitely going to want some cake.

But Dan isn’t sure. Marriage does seem pointless when there’s no legally-binding aspect of it and you’re an atheist. On the other hand, his Catholic mom would be beyond thrilled. Plus he’s already planning a ten-year anniversary party—the anniversary of his and Terry’s first date—and he wants everyone in the family to travel to Seattle for it, and to take it as seriously as they take other major family events. And it’s not like he’s going to be leaving Terry.

So he sets out, in his somewhat contrarian way, to explore the issue. He takes his little family to a summer camp for kids with queer families, so DJ can see that other kids *do* have parents with matching genders. The following summer, he brings his whole family along—mom, siblings-and-partners, everyone. He has conversations with them about why they have or have not chosen to marry and/or have kids, he has debates with Terry about the drawbacks and virtues of marriage and tattoos and how best to plan for their anniversary party.

The most interesting conversations he has, to me, are the ones he has with his older brother, Bill. I realized while listening to Dan recounting them just how much his philosophies on life, sex, and relationships are informed by Bill’s. In fact, many of Dan’s most regularly-repeated nuggets of wisdom come directly from the conversations about marriage that he had with Bill that summer.

In case you’re not already a Dan Savage fan and don’t already know how the story ends, I won’t spoil it for you. Whether you’re already one of his readers or listeners or not, though, I do  highly recommend this book. It’s an interesting and very personal and journey through what the politics of DOMA and the religious right put families through, and it’s told with clarity, frankness, and (sometimes self-deprecating) humor. It’s no longer ripped-from-the-headlines current, but it’s an important piece of (recent) LGBTQ+ history and a moving story.

Calypso by David Sedaris

read by the author

If you’ve never heard David Sedaris read, go google Santaland Diaries right now. You want an excerpt of him on NPR. Go ahead. I’ll wait. 

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All right, now that you’ve listened, you’re starting to get the picture. Sedaris is a memoirist and a performer of his memoirs, which are written in short… anecdotes? They’re more structured than that. Stage performances? You do definitely want to hear him read his work, but it also works very well in print. Stories? They are definitely that, but also highly personal and, to say the least, quirky as hell. Also deeply, sometimes shockingly, funny. You’re never sure how much of them to actually believe.

The term I see bandied about is “semi-autobiographical essays.” Which seems accurate enough, if a little pedantic. He collects these semi-autobiographical essays into books every so often, and Calypso is one of those collections.

It’s a bit of a departure from a lot of his previous work, because he was writing these stories/memories/anecdotes at a time in his life when he was dealing with the death of two family members. It’s still funny, because he’s a man who can see the humor in literally anything, and make you see it, too--and be a little shocked at yourself for laughing.

What you’ll be laughing about in this collection is a series of family vacations at a beach house on the Carolina coast, haunted by bickering, badgering, the arrival of middle age, and both the specter and the reality of mortality. There are snapping turtles and book signings, transatlantic travel and family dinners. Sedaris writes in lovingly, gleefully unsparing detail about everyone’s quirks and faults, his own most of all.

If that idea makes you squeamish, or really, if you’re squeamish at all, you should probably skip this one. But if you can handle a little tumor humor and a lot of blatant (but never gratiutous) oversharing, dive in. If he can laugh at his life, and make us laugh at it too, maybe you can start seeing the ridiculousness in yours.

Oh. And if possible, listen to the audiobook version, which he reads himself.

Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram

read by Michael Levi Harris

So what we have here is a kid who calls himself a “fractional Persian”—raised “American” in the U.S. by his Persian mom and blond “Übermensch” dad. (He loves Persian cooking, for example, but only speaks enough Farsi to be polite and talk about food.) He nerds out about Star Trek, Tolkien, Harry Potter, and, of all things, tea. He’s a little overweight and get teased at school and doesn’t have many friends, which makes him a constant disappointment to his dad. In fact, Star Trek is just about all he has in common with his dad. That, and depression, and a chronic inability to express himself.

He’s also smart and thoughtful and, it turns out, pretty decent at soccer, a.k.a. non-American football—and a really good friend. But we don’t know about any of this at the beginning of the story, and neiher does he. Well, maybe the smart part, but not the rest.

Things start to move when the family takes a trip to Yazd, Iran, to visit with the grandparents he’s never met in person before. His grandfather is formidable and his grandmother is sweet and he’s expected to make friends with the neighbor kid, Sohrab. Which actually turns out to be the greatest thing ever. Because Sohrab is super interested in Darius, and draws him out, and helps him feel like it’s okay to be himself, fractional or not.

What I loved about this book: it made me fall in love with Iran and with Persian culture (and made me super hungry for Persian food). The relationships were varied, three-dimensional, believable, relatable, and central to the story. The drama was dramatic indeed… but also understated (way more Benjamin Alire Sáenz than, say, Francesca Lia Block). There was tons of representation, most of it very off-hand, all of it spot-on, especially regarding depression. And Darius himself was such a sweet, dysfunctional nerd. I feel like I went out with him, or maybe I was him, in high school.

Highly recommend for all fractional Americans and most anybody else.