The Kid: (What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant) an Adoption Story Book

Dan Savage brings the same frank, occasionally filthy voice familiar from his popular sex advice column and podcasts to his first book, published about a decade ago. Unfortunately, he also brings along his tendency to get sidetracked with political rants and his penchant for beating the same points into the ground over and over.

I really enjoyed the majority of this book, which tells the story of Dan and his boyfriend trying to adopt a child, the whole nerve-wracking process from researching their legal options to musing over inseminating a lesbian couple to the agonizing wait for a birthparent to choose them to take her child. Dan is a really funny guy, and parts of this book will make you laugh pretty hard, including his example of what not to write in your letter to all the mothers out there looking to choose parents for their babies ("We live in a cramped apartment filled with dangerous and sharp-edged tchotchkes perched high atop unstable tables purchased at an Ikea seconds sale."). Parts of this book will also make you a little sad; though it's not really a depressing story, Dan and his boyfriend have some hard choices to make when they learn that the introverted street kid who has chosen them to raise her child drank during much of her pregnancy.

This book might also annoy you, because Dan takes the opportunity to climb onto his soapbox a little too often, especially in the first 60 pages or so. Instead of telling his personal story, he goes on for pages and pages about the additional hurdles faced by homosexual parents looking to adopt or marry. These rants, which might be relevant but didn't really need to go on for pages and pages, making the same point over and over, are full of righteous anger and vitriol and aren't very fun to read. You get the idea the book wasn't edited very rigorously and Dan started off not really knowing where he was going with it (he admits as much in a chapter about how he got a book deal and spent the advance before he knew what he was going to write about, which gave him a reason to finally pull the trigger on the long-gestating adoption dream).

If the final product is uneven, Dan's story of bring a new life into the world, so to speak, is heartfelt and occasionally moving and almost as good as reading his advice to people with centaur fetishes, pegging fantasies, and problems with threesome logistics.