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Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood
"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 i>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 couple he had known since college, two women, came to him with a would Joe be a bio-dad and would he co-parent alongside them?
Soon everything was falling into place. But when the two mothers 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.
“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 i>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 couple he had known since college, two women, came to him with a would Joe be a bio-dad and would he co-parent alongside them?
Soon everything was falling into place. But when the two mothers 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.
208 pages, Hardcover
Published May 26, 2026
About the author
Joseph Osmundson
7 books69 followersJoseph Osmundson is a professor of microbiology at New York University and the author of Virology. His work has been published in leading biological journals including Cell and PNAS and in the Village Voice, Gawker, the Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. He lives and works in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 30, 2026
This book did not end the way I had anticipated. I had hoped for life, for hope, for Fry to take material form.
This book accompanies one man as he tries to become a parent with his friends, and then the rejection he experiences when they pick another donor. I wanted to put the book down at that point. I was so angry for him. He slides over anger in favor of his grief but I felt anger on his behalf. I understood his absence when their baby was eventually born, after the lesbian couple made repeated choices that centered just themselves and not the family unit they had claimed they were creating together.
I noticed at the end that the author talks about how often he sees Saleema’s baby with real numbers and specifics about what they do together, but talks only of seeing Kay and Jaime’s child as “not enough.” I don’t know what specifics he is avoiding but it felt to me as if the grief and anger were still there.
I learned a lot about salmon in this book and the author did weave it together well, but I personally would have been happier with a little less salmon and more about how to move on when you have to. When you gave up a romantic relationship to be a parent and then you don’t get the child. I really feel for the author, and I don’t say that because I see him as yearning for sympathy or anything like that. I see him trying to make sense of his life and his future and it’s hard.
I was lucky enough to receive a copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review.
This book accompanies one man as he tries to become a parent with his friends, and then the rejection he experiences when they pick another donor. I wanted to put the book down at that point. I was so angry for him. He slides over anger in favor of his grief but I felt anger on his behalf. I understood his absence when their baby was eventually born, after the lesbian couple made repeated choices that centered just themselves and not the family unit they had claimed they were creating together.
I noticed at the end that the author talks about how often he sees Saleema’s baby with real numbers and specifics about what they do together, but talks only of seeing Kay and Jaime’s child as “not enough.” I don’t know what specifics he is avoiding but it felt to me as if the grief and anger were still there.
I learned a lot about salmon in this book and the author did weave it together well, but I personally would have been happier with a little less salmon and more about how to move on when you have to. When you gave up a romantic relationship to be a parent and then you don’t get the child. I really feel for the author, and I don’t say that because I see him as yearning for sympathy or anything like that. I see him trying to make sense of his life and his future and it’s hard.
I was lucky enough to receive a copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 28, 2026
This was such a beautifully written book and really nice to listen to as an audiobook. Queer families, the feeling of needing to nurture, cooking, salmon (which I learned so much about), love. I felt the authors joy, hope, grief, life, future, dreams through his storytelling, and wish that I could also meet his pocket sized fry
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
The premise of this book immediately hooked me, and there were lots of reasons I stuck around to the end. The ongoing extended metaphor comparing the biology and lifecycle of salmon to the expectations of queer parenting was really interesting; it made me recall fondly the summer I spent researching salmon in Washington and Oregon, so I really appreciated this whole other aspect of the book. But the center of it is presented pretty directly as the dilemmas of modern-day child-rearing: Is it ethical to bring more children into our rapidly declining world? How much of ourselves should we plan to sacrifice once we become parents? What can parenting look like within queer relationships?
There are ways to address these questions without having to read far into the book -- the apocalypse has already happened many times over for different ethnic groups over time (it's just that white people see it as their time now); parenting beyond the template of the nuclear family has always been the norm (and the insistence of white families on maintaining the nuclear family unit is outmoded); the degree of sacrifice one makes as a parent is acutely personal and cannot be decided broadly.
But the author provides his own compelling and insightful responses to these questions. I found them to be very moving and compassionate.
The most provocative element that some conservative readers might react to -- which I found to be the most important part of the book -- is the author's refrain: men can be mothers too, and good ones at that. The author frames Mothering as the expression of care and nourishment for others. He recalls the first time his therapist told him about Carl Jung's concept of the animus and the anima. His initial reaction was: "I can be more than a man or an animal. I can be closer to God. I can be different than so many of the men in my own family. I can be soft. I can be present. I can be quiet. I can be patient. I can withstand silence. I will guard our nest. I'll give my body for it, for the nutrients [his daughter] will need to grow. I can nourish, both our generation and now the next" (LOC 1347). This concept develops over the last half of the book and it is one of the more rewarding parts of finishing the book.
While the book remains thoughtful and considerate, a couple things gave me pause and pushed me to think deeper. There are limits to the author's experience of queer and racial solidarities.
MILD SPOILER RELEVANT TO THE POINT: I was surprised he seems to hold no resentment toward the bio-mom in his three-person relationship for boxing him out of their birthing decisions and ultimately refusing his sperm donation in favor of finding a donor aligned with the racial identity of his co-parent. He appears to harbor a strong sense of white guilt, and is willing to suffer his rejection because his whiteness is to blame (for unclear reasons). And he still offers to co-parent this child anyway, but ultimately neglects her for the first months of her life, which leads the bio-mom and his co-parent to resent him and further box him out of their lives. Even though he claims they are still friends? It was confusing to me how he withheld any sense of blame of others but blamed himself. Perhaps this aligns with a different refrain found throughout the book -- "I am an Irish Catholic woman" -- in which harboring guilt and accepting blame are expected and accepted.
There is a lot to think about and process in this book, but I'm really glad I read it. The question of how to parent in the twenty-first century is in the zeitgeist right now, and I think this book can open a lot of minds toward creative solutions.
There are ways to address these questions without having to read far into the book -- the apocalypse has already happened many times over for different ethnic groups over time (it's just that white people see it as their time now); parenting beyond the template of the nuclear family has always been the norm (and the insistence of white families on maintaining the nuclear family unit is outmoded); the degree of sacrifice one makes as a parent is acutely personal and cannot be decided broadly.
But the author provides his own compelling and insightful responses to these questions. I found them to be very moving and compassionate.
The most provocative element that some conservative readers might react to -- which I found to be the most important part of the book -- is the author's refrain: men can be mothers too, and good ones at that. The author frames Mothering as the expression of care and nourishment for others. He recalls the first time his therapist told him about Carl Jung's concept of the animus and the anima. His initial reaction was: "I can be more than a man or an animal. I can be closer to God. I can be different than so many of the men in my own family. I can be soft. I can be present. I can be quiet. I can be patient. I can withstand silence. I will guard our nest. I'll give my body for it, for the nutrients [his daughter] will need to grow. I can nourish, both our generation and now the next" (LOC 1347). This concept develops over the last half of the book and it is one of the more rewarding parts of finishing the book.
While the book remains thoughtful and considerate, a couple things gave me pause and pushed me to think deeper. There are limits to the author's experience of queer and racial solidarities.
MILD SPOILER RELEVANT TO THE POINT: I was surprised he seems to hold no resentment toward the bio-mom in his three-person relationship for boxing him out of their birthing decisions and ultimately refusing his sperm donation in favor of finding a donor aligned with the racial identity of his co-parent. He appears to harbor a strong sense of white guilt, and is willing to suffer his rejection because his whiteness is to blame (for unclear reasons). And he still offers to co-parent this child anyway, but ultimately neglects her for the first months of her life, which leads the bio-mom and his co-parent to resent him and further box him out of their lives. Even though he claims they are still friends? It was confusing to me how he withheld any sense of blame of others but blamed himself. Perhaps this aligns with a different refrain found throughout the book -- "I am an Irish Catholic woman" -- in which harboring guilt and accepting blame are expected and accepted.
There is a lot to think about and process in this book, but I'm really glad I read it. The question of how to parent in the twenty-first century is in the zeitgeist right now, and I think this book can open a lot of minds toward creative solutions.
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February 19, 2026thank you to netgalley for an advanced copy!
a wrenching but hopeful biography about the desire for parenthood, the building of queer families, and coping with loss - where fly tying is drag, poppy seed lemon cakes are motherhood, and we are the ones who too will create and mourn thousands of our own ideas for the future, hoping at least one of them will make it.
this book mixes the author's personal experiences with a deep dive into salmon, which I found really fun!! it also really primed the tone. for example, where discussions of mother-to-child nourishment in salmon were a relevant backdrop to the author's inner world, the sudden introduction to sockeye salmons then presented a SUPPERR effective tone shift.
that said, I felt that these two subjects naturally drew parallels to one another, and did not need to be repeatedly stapled together by the writing itself. I felt that the attempt to make sure these two things felt interconnected to the reader actually resulted in a lot of repetition. I wish that the time had been spent on committing to a much deeper exploration of identity, gender, desire. for me, this book shone in the moments that it was fiercely emotional, ballsy, sometimes even candidly vulgar. I got a taste of that, and it made me want so much more! I'd be really interested in exploring what else the author has written.
a wrenching but hopeful biography about the desire for parenthood, the building of queer families, and coping with loss - where fly tying is drag, poppy seed lemon cakes are motherhood, and we are the ones who too will create and mourn thousands of our own ideas for the future, hoping at least one of them will make it.
this book mixes the author's personal experiences with a deep dive into salmon, which I found really fun!! it also really primed the tone. for example, where discussions of mother-to-child nourishment in salmon were a relevant backdrop to the author's inner world, the sudden introduction to sockeye salmons then presented a SUPPERR effective tone shift.
that said, I felt that these two subjects naturally drew parallels to one another, and did not need to be repeatedly stapled together by the writing itself. I felt that the attempt to make sure these two things felt interconnected to the reader actually resulted in a lot of repetition. I wish that the time had been spent on committing to a much deeper exploration of identity, gender, desire. for me, this book shone in the moments that it was fiercely emotional, ballsy, sometimes even candidly vulgar. I got a taste of that, and it made me want so much more! I'd be really interested in exploring what else the author has written.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I really enjoyed this memoir. While balancing beautifully between the poetic and the scientific, Osmundson dives into queer parenthood and the lives of salmon with equal fervor. I was rooting for Joseph the whole time and deeply empathized with their joys and griefs. The book has a way of hooking you and keeping you engaged until the end. There were a few concepts I wish the author had explored further, such as the adoption industrial complex. I get that it's bad, but I want to know why the author thinks so, especially since many queer parents do adopt.
Overall, this was a wonderfully emotional and imaginative book. I suggest it to a wide swath of readers, since it touches on environmental science, personal memoir, queer theory, etc. Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced copy.
Overall, this was a wonderfully emotional and imaginative book. I suggest it to a wide swath of readers, since it touches on environmental science, personal memoir, queer theory, etc. Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced copy.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This book had a really powerful momentum: Osmundson is a masterful storyteller whose prose just makes you turn the page. I've never read a memoir like this before, one that circles around a topic rather than a chronological account, and I am very struck by how this style captures the feeling of grief (how it can crash over you over and over) and the introspection ever-present, making this a very personal book that almost feels like living in someone's head. I also enjoyed the framing of salmon reproduction and evolutionary fitness as metaphor, learnt a lot of new facts.
Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA for the ARC.
Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA for the ARC.
May 31, 2026
Gosh, I read this book at the perfect time in my life. What a healing, cathartic gift to read about this type of grief.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews