The Velveteen Father
An Unexpected Journey to Parenthood
(Hardcover: Villard, 1999)
(Paperback: Ballantine, 2000)

Everything conspires against the single, childless man. Each new living thing in the world each day says: You are alone, and not getting younger.

At the age of thirty-seven, the journalist and novelist Jesse Green found his life dramatically changing when he met and fell in love with a man who had recently adopted a baby boy. Having long since made peace with his choice not to be a parent, Green now faced the shock and the responsibility of a fatherhood he had never imagined. The Velveteen Father is his candid, heartfelt, and often hilarious account of the formation and flourishing of a family. (continues)

In intimate, graceful prose, Green describes his partner's journey from the hedonistic eighties to the realization that he wanted to have a child; his own concurrent journey to find a way to become an adult without having a child; and their journey together to become good parents in a society whose reactions to unconventional families can be both funny and frightening.

In the classic bedtime story, a velveteen rabbit is made real at last by a child's true love. The Velveteen Father is a moving record of the transformative effect parenthood can have on people who least expect to become parents, of how we are repeatedly made anew by the love of children who need us. But this transformation is not just the province of parents, Green writes; only by addressing, in some way, the generations that come before and after us can we face the task of becoming real. The Velveteen Father will therefore interest anyone who has considered--or would consider--having a child.

O Beautiful
(Ballantine/Available Press, 1992/2000)

Martin takes the day off from work to make an elaborate meal for his friend Stella and the blind date who could be Martin's match. Matt certainly is charming and good-looking, but—as both Martin and Stella discover before the entree is served—he is also straight. Yet by evening's end, Martin is irrevocably drawn to this magnetic, spirited, and unattainable man.

So Martin obliges when Matt finds himself needing a place to stay, and the two embark upon an oddly comfortable relationship that involves every shade of intimacy but sex. The closer Martin gets to Matt, however, the more he realizes that his enigmatic roommate may not be all that he seems.