Spawning Season
An Experiment in Queer Parenthood
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 26 May 2026
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- £13.99
Publisher Description
"Osmundson's 2022 essay collection Virology established the NYU professor as a voice of his generation…In Spawning Season, Osmundson looks at queer parenthood and the natural world" -Boston Globe
"A singular and deeply moving book. Osmundson has birthed a profound meditation on family and food, longing and loss, hope and grief, humans and salmon. In his story, we find a multitude of beautiful, complicated ways of imagining the future-and then working to build one." –Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winner and New York Times bestselling author of An Immense World
From the author of National Book Critics Circle Award and Lambda Literary Award finalist VIROLOGY comes an intimate chronicle of queer family-making.
Since grade school, Joseph Osmundson dreamed of being pregnant. As he grew into the queer scientist he is today, the economic precarity of academia and the warming planet led to his decision not to reproduce. That is, until a lesbian couple he had known since college came to him with a proposition: would Joe be a bio-dad and would he co-parent alongside them?
Soon everything was falling into place. But when the two partners communicated their need for a child to reflect their own racial backgrounds, Joe's whiteness exposed fault lines in their parenting journey. Spawning Season is a genre-bending memoir that treats the scientific as integral to the personal and that builds an entire species of the grief we carry in our bodies. In exploratory prose that builds on the work of Donna Haraway and José Esteban Muñoz, Osmundson considers the ethics of child-rearing in the 21st century, the brutal wonder of caregiving, and the joys and intricacies of building family beyond biology.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biophysicist Osmundson (Virology) blends memoir and science writing in this moving meditation on queer family, the climate crisis, and 21st-century child-rearing. Balancing the scientific with the poetic, Osmundson documents the mating patterns of salmon, dives into age-old questions of nature vs. nurture, and quotes a range of literary sources from Carl Jung to Virginia Woolf to supplement the core narrative about his brush with parenthood. Osmundson remembers wanting children—wanting to be pregnant, in fact—since he was a young boy. As an adult in New York City, he was approached by a lesbian couple, both friends of his, who asked him to be a sperm donor and coparent to their child. The process sent Osmundson spiraling through standard contemporary parenting anxieties (the planet is dying; the cost of living is high) and nudged him toward more profound questions about passing one's grief and anxiety onto their offspring and determining what makes a functional family when building one beyond the boundaries of a two-parent household. Though Osmundson's story takes some heartbreaking turns, the mood is more inquisitive than melancholy: his reflections teem with the restless curiosity of someone who's devoted their professional life to asking questions. The result is at once edifying and affecting.
