Mums and dads just like us

Elizabeth Harris on gay families in fiction

The Times called How to Sleep at Night ‘Deliciously chaotic… feverishly funny – Harris has gleeful fun dissecting this timely tale'

How many novels can you think of that are about gay parents?

Don’t feel bad if your list is short. I’m sure such books are out there, but off the top of my head, it was hard to come up with any list at all.

This was not something I thought about when I started writing my first novel, How to Sleep at Night. I wanted to write about what happens when who we are in the world doesn’t match how we see ourselves, and I had four characters kicking around in my head. Two of them happened to be gay parents.

As I moved from draft to draft, however, I realised I had an unusual opportunity: these gay parents might be the only gay parents some of my readers would ever get to know. Yes, Alison Bechdel wrote about her gay father in her classic memoir, Fun Home; sure, Cameron and Mitchell raised their daughter Lily in Modern Family. But fiction offers something, a kind of living truth, that neither autobiography nor sitcom can access in the same way. This representation may seem even more crucial now to many LGBTQ people in the United States, where I live, who feel threatened by the rhetoric and actions of the new Trump Administration.

I am a reporter at The New York Times, where I cover books, so I can’t talk about my own politics in public. But regardless of what I think personally, I am in a position to introduce a gay family that, I hope, reflects real life and all the attendant love and chaos you’d find in any household with young kids.

Writing about young kids is hard. Like anyone else in a good book, they have their own agendas and temperaments, but the way they see the world and what they’re looking for is kid-specific. Adult lives might be falling apart around them, but kids still want to know if dinosaurs wore shoes or how the chicken on their plate died and if it hurt. They’re really not all that concerned about what’s going on in Mommy’s life — even if what’s going on in Mommy’s life is crucial to the plot — because when they’re little, they’re only dimly aware that Mommy is a person at all. What makes kids a challenge to get right is also what can make them such a vivid presence in a novel. They are shocks of light and surprise, completely themselves, unhindered by societal norms.

How to Sleep at Night follows four interconnected people. There’s a woman who’s become a stay-at-home mom by accident and feels like an accessory in her husband’s life. There’s a woman whose career is her entire world, but it’s a job she’s come to dread and resent. And then there are two men who are married; one is liberal, one is conservative, and as the book begins, the conservative decides to run for office.