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Staying Power: On Queerness, Inheritances, and the Families We Choose
A remarkably frank memoir about interdependence, grieving, and parenting as a queer femme that doesn't leave out the messy or the erotic
Staying Power, Zena Sharman's memoir in essays, is a beautiful and honest journey of care work, grief, parenting, and chosen family in the wake of intergenerational trauma. Exploring the lessons and inheritances of being raised by survivors of complex traumas, the book challenges the notion that one must be healed in order to parent well and celebrates the transformative power of queer family-making beyond gay marriage and assimilation into the nuclear family.
The book, which recounts the author's experiences of raising three children in a four-parent queer family, asks, "If leaving has helped you survive, how do you learn to stay?" Sharman finds answers in queer kinship, femme erotics, leatherdyke lineages, and the radical possibilities inherent in doing motherwork outside of motherhood, recognizing that sometimes you fight the thing you want most.
Staying Power is a moving, deeply personal account of one person's journey of unlearning independence through an experiment in queer collective care.
Staying Power, Zena Sharman's memoir in essays, is a beautiful and honest journey of care work, grief, parenting, and chosen family in the wake of intergenerational trauma. Exploring the lessons and inheritances of being raised by survivors of complex traumas, the book challenges the notion that one must be healed in order to parent well and celebrates the transformative power of queer family-making beyond gay marriage and assimilation into the nuclear family.
The book, which recounts the author's experiences of raising three children in a four-parent queer family, asks, "If leaving has helped you survive, how do you learn to stay?" Sharman finds answers in queer kinship, femme erotics, leatherdyke lineages, and the radical possibilities inherent in doing motherwork outside of motherhood, recognizing that sometimes you fight the thing you want most.
Staying Power is a moving, deeply personal account of one person's journey of unlearning independence through an experiment in queer collective care.
224 pages, Paperback
Published March 3, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
This was a meaty one to wrestle with - Zena Sharman's embodiment of queerness is not one that I share, and her honesty about the parts of her that are selfish or struggle is sometimes difficult to sit with. Both of these things made the book more powerful; Sharman is a compelling enough writer that I wanted to sit through the struggle and unfamiliarity with her. Her growth throughout the book, the conscious efforts she makes in love, family, and dedication, are powerful to read about, and the depth of thought she gives to her decisions past and future encourages me to believe in a world where people are not helplessly tied to their first impulses.
I've read "memoirs in essays" in the past that fail on the metric of "essays," but each chapter of this book has an intelligent structure and thesis. They all come together into a cohesive arc, but within each essay Sharman stays focused. I really appreciate that, in the face of (many) other books where the idea of an essay is touted but completely abandoned in practice. Sharman's decisions in how to frame each of her core explorations - sex, motherhood/Mommyhood, femmehood, kink, learning to be a partner and parent, her mother's trauma and parenting, etc. - are well-considered and make each essay interesting in form as well as subject.
She says at the beginning that she is afraid people won't believe everything she says, especially some elements of her mother's life. I can understand that and I acknowledge uncertainty about what the truth might actually be - I'm sorry, Zena! - but really that gave me more to chew on, and I like the ambiguity and uncertainty that is laced through the book.
Sharman's candor is notable even for a memoir - she makes herself remarkably vulnerable, even as she obscures certain specifics of the events of her life (and especially her mother's). In fact she openly comments on her fear of that vulnerability at several junctures, and I appreciate her...not fearlessness, but her consistent dogged will in changing from a person who runs from her fears to someone who comes at them ready to fight and win.
Quick to read, interesting to contemplate, something I wanted to return to whenever I had to put it down and do other things. Sharman isn't a novice writer, and has a body of other cool work published, but I'm glad she turned to memoir for this book.
I've read "memoirs in essays" in the past that fail on the metric of "essays," but each chapter of this book has an intelligent structure and thesis. They all come together into a cohesive arc, but within each essay Sharman stays focused. I really appreciate that, in the face of (many) other books where the idea of an essay is touted but completely abandoned in practice. Sharman's decisions in how to frame each of her core explorations - sex, motherhood/Mommyhood, femmehood, kink, learning to be a partner and parent, her mother's trauma and parenting, etc. - are well-considered and make each essay interesting in form as well as subject.
She says at the beginning that she is afraid people won't believe everything she says, especially some elements of her mother's life. I can understand that and I acknowledge uncertainty about what the truth might actually be - I'm sorry, Zena! - but really that gave me more to chew on, and I like the ambiguity and uncertainty that is laced through the book.
Sharman's candor is notable even for a memoir - she makes herself remarkably vulnerable, even as she obscures certain specifics of the events of her life (and especially her mother's). In fact she openly comments on her fear of that vulnerability at several junctures, and I appreciate her...not fearlessness, but her consistent dogged will in changing from a person who runs from her fears to someone who comes at them ready to fight and win.
Quick to read, interesting to contemplate, something I wanted to return to whenever I had to put it down and do other things. Sharman isn't a novice writer, and has a body of other cool work published, but I'm glad she turned to memoir for this book.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Love That Stays
How did the book make me feel/think?
A queer female author. A dying mother. Economic precarity. Mental health. Stigma.
I turn the pages searching for connection.
I’m not femme.
“You have a girl’s name.”
I’m a boy.
Distance.
Then, my father became ill in the 1970s. Connection found in history.
We lived on the precipice of poverty. Connection cemented.
Mental health? Back then, diagnosis felt dangerous. Another label. More stigma.
What will the neighbours think?
Hospitals that felt more like prisons. Thousands of visits. Death always nearby.
How do we navigate pain?
How do we navigate pain if we are poor and other?
Every page feels like an unpacking of courage.
Zena shares her thirty-nine steps through grief — not instructions etched in stone, but a generous map. Personal. Imperfect. Human.
For anyone grieving, it resonates.
Her mother dies.
In my life, Dad went first. Then Mum.
Up, down, sideways, looping — grief doesn’t move forward. It circles. Survival feels questionable at best.
Purgatory.
A life in limbo, trying to define meaning while everything you leaned on disappears.
Then queer love.
Four adults co-parenting children.
Eyes look down in judgment. I catch myself almost joining them.
Then: WTF do I know? Right. Wrong. Moral. Normal. Who decides?
In Staying Power, Zena Sharman offers something rare — not answers, but company. A salve for grief. A reminder we aren’t alone. That while loss is collective, each path through it is pulchritudinously individual.
And somehow, threaded through it all: love that stays.
WRITTEN: 8 February 2026
How did the book make me feel/think?
A queer female author. A dying mother. Economic precarity. Mental health. Stigma.
I turn the pages searching for connection.
I’m not femme.
“You have a girl’s name.”
I’m a boy.
Distance.
Then, my father became ill in the 1970s. Connection found in history.
We lived on the precipice of poverty. Connection cemented.
Mental health? Back then, diagnosis felt dangerous. Another label. More stigma.
What will the neighbours think?
Hospitals that felt more like prisons. Thousands of visits. Death always nearby.
How do we navigate pain?
How do we navigate pain if we are poor and other?
Every page feels like an unpacking of courage.
Zena shares her thirty-nine steps through grief — not instructions etched in stone, but a generous map. Personal. Imperfect. Human.
For anyone grieving, it resonates.
Her mother dies.
In my life, Dad went first. Then Mum.
Up, down, sideways, looping — grief doesn’t move forward. It circles. Survival feels questionable at best.
Purgatory.
A life in limbo, trying to define meaning while everything you leaned on disappears.
Then queer love.
Four adults co-parenting children.
Eyes look down in judgment. I catch myself almost joining them.
Then: WTF do I know? Right. Wrong. Moral. Normal. Who decides?
In Staying Power, Zena Sharman offers something rare — not answers, but company. A salve for grief. A reminder we aren’t alone. That while loss is collective, each path through it is pulchritudinously individual.
And somehow, threaded through it all: love that stays.
WRITTEN: 8 February 2026
May 19, 2026
Such an interesting and frankly unusual memoire. Queer grief, gender, trauma, chosen families, parenthood, mother loss, sexuality, kink, BDSM, boundaries. This memoir explores one woman's journey - and metamorphoses - through multiple stages of life and identity. I felt a little voyeuristic reading it, and suspected Sharman might be even more of an exhibitionist than the average memoirist. I do appreciate her bravery in laying bare her own life, but I felt protective towards her famous ex spouse, who is recognizable though unnamed in this memoir. They apparently didn't remain friends after their split. This may be a me thing, but I felt I was being asked, subtly, to choose sides. (And if so, I choose her ex spouse, discretion being the better of valor and all.)
[Edited to add: My local library purchased this book at my request.]
[Edited to add: My local library purchased this book at my request.]
May 2, 2026
This book is for the queer, kinky femmes with complicated relationships to our dead and our living. I appreciated the themes around grief, learning to stay, building queer family, and rituals as ways to process life. I loved the ways that Sharman exposed her own uncertainties, the things she was ashamed of and regretted, and the ways she was learning to live with those tensions. I also loved that she was writing from the unapologetic position of femme, and that Dolly Parton made it in there! And finally, I'm so glad she brought Mommy dynamics into the motherhood content ~ kinky queers deserve this kind of nuance! I cried a lot during this book, underlined a lot of passages, and am so excited to give copies to some of the femmes in my life who mother in a multitude of ways.
Read
April 8, 2026Let's just say that clearly I am not the reader for this one and move on.
DNF
DNF
May 7, 2026
I will be returning to this book in 5 years to see if I learned to stay. I think this’ll become one of the foundational texts in my life
June 16, 2026
Interesting perspectives
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews