Breakfast With Scot: A Novel

Description

Sam and Ed live the high life, and see no reason to add to their happy twosome. Then 11-year-old Scot's mother dies, and a wine-soaked promise pushes the couple into parenthood. They dutifully make all the usual arrangements, but Scot is far from usual, sporting makeup and enduring bullying at school. Soon Sam and Ed begin to question their parenting, their commitment to each other, and the compromises they've made to live in a straight society. Breakfast with Scot is a humorous, heartwarming novel about the true meaning of family.

Michael Downing's novels include the national bestseller Perfect Agreement, named one of the 10 Best Books of the year by Amazon and Newsday, and Breakfast with Scot, a comedy about two gay men who inadvertently become parents. An American Library Association honor book, Breakfast with Scot was adapted as a movie that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. His nonfiction includes Shoes Outside the Door- Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center, hailed by the New York Review of Books as a "dramatic and insightful" narrative history of the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia, and by the Los Angeles Times as "a highly readable book." His essays and reviews appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and other periodicals. Michael teaches creative writing at Tufts University. He and his partner have lived together in Cambridge for more than 25 years.

"Witty, poignant, laugh-out-loud funny, deftly insightful and full of people you wish you knew, plus a few you're glad you don't. It's a turn-of-the-millennium look at parenthood, families, relationships . . . Scot is irresistable." -Newsday "The prose . . . is melodious and lucid. This heartwarming tale nobly defines and describes a potent, realistic new configuration of contemporary American family values." -Publishers Weekly "Witty and poignant, Breakfast with Scot is a hilariously sweet take on the woes and joys of parenthood as seen through the eyes of a gay couple . . . Downing's prose is lively, quick, and vivid . . . Downing explores what it truly means to be a family, compassionately contrasting familial stereotypes with the realities of family life and showing how it feels to be a boy who doesn't quite fit into the role society has prepared for him."-Booklist