WINNER of the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award
“An empathetic writer who can do justice to simple happiness and complicated love.” — Ms. Magazine
Available for the first time as an e-book in March 2013 with A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR.
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Before I began writing My Lesbian Husband I thought the issue of “lesbian marriage” was dull, conservative, even repressive. Then my baby brother announced his wedding engagement. As I watched the cultural machinery of the marriage ritual take hold of my south-side-of-Chicago family I began to wonder—what is the place of a couple of longtime lesbian lovers amongst all this hoopla? This is a book by the lesbian at the wedding. I’ve written about how it feels for a butch-femme couple like my beloved and I to stand on the sidelines of the family extravaganza, but also about who we are when we dance amidst the hoopla of our own making.
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ADVANCE PRAISE for My Lesbian Husband
In My Lesbian Husband, Barrie Jean Borich asks a fascinating question: do the names we give our relationships change their meanings? Each chapter entertains an aspect of this question with prose that is spirited, artful, anything but pat. Here is an author who takes neither love nor the power of language for granted, and her book is as provocative and lively as the love it evokes. An extraordinary performance by a writer who renews our wonder at the complexity of human connection.
-Bernard Cooper
Barrie Jean Borich wins my respect with her ingenious and original description of feelings which, for many, need translating into a familiar language. She writes about her lover and their life together with a rare deftness, clarity, and antic sense of humor, never strident or defensive, rather self-confident and as if she herself were curious to discover what she is thinking about their relationship.
-Rosellen Brown
In language as charged as the air between lovers, Barrie Jean Borich offers us a gorgeous and tender aria to marriage. She tells of discovering with astonishment, through twelve years of devotion to the same sturdy woman, how much she delights in fidelity. She tells of slowly weaving her unsanctioned love into the fabric of her family, in among brothers and sisters-in-law, among nieces and nephews and wary parents. She describes the alchemy of turning a house into a home. Through it all, she writes like a woman possessed—enraptured by the sensual pleasures of words, by the power of stories, by the gravity of neighborhood. She reminds us that marriage is made not by the joining of bodies shaped a certain way, but by the joining of two lives, careers, and histories in one place, in one embrace.
-Scott Russell Sanders
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