Germs of Truth

A book about life, death, families of all ages, stages, and orientation-and sperm banks. In this engaging and thoughtful collection of short stories, we find people of all ages trying to make sense-poignant, often funny, sometimes wise-of the many, changing ways they intersect as parents, children, and families from conception to death. In the first section, We're All Donors Here, a woman muses, "I mean, when you go to a sperm bank, you have to realize that sperm is like money. It gets handled by a lot of people but is essentially impersonal. It's what you use it for that gives it meaning." In the second section, Whose Life Is It Anyway, an artist asks her second husband and their assembled adult children, "Do you ever feel you are living out someone else's story?" With the help of those they live with and love more or less well, and of their ghosts, living and dead, hungry and nurturing, the tellers of these ten stories seek to get their lives back, and, surprisingly, do-mysteriously renewed.