The Ginger Child: On Family, Loss and Adoption

by Patrick Flanery

A raw and heart-wrenching literary memoir about a queer couple's attempt to adopt a child.

But would you take a ginger child? a social worker asks Patrick Flanery as he and his husband embark on their four-year odyssey of trying to adopt. This curious question comes to haunt the journey, which Flanery recounts with startling candour as he explores what it means to make a family as a queer couple, to be an outsider in a foreign country, to grapple with the inheritance of intergenerational loss, and to discover that the emotions we feel are sometimes as mysterious to ourselves as to others.

This uniquely powerful book moves deftly between heartbreaking memoir and illuminating meditation on parenting, adoption and queerness in contemporary culture, stopping along the way to consider recent science fiction film, camp horror television, fiction and visual art. At the end, which could also be the beginning of a new journey, Flanery asks whether we might all imagine ourselves as ginger children-fragile, sensitive, more easily hurt than we think possible, but with the hope that we are also survivors, with greater powers of resilience than we know.

Genres: Nonfiction, Adoption, LGBT, Memoir

288 pages, Hardcover

Published May 2, 2019

About the author

Patrick Flanery was born in California in 1975 and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. After earning a BFA in Film from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts he worked for three years in the film industry before moving to the UK, where he completed a doctorate in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Oxford. As well as publishing scholarly articles on British and South African literature and film in a number of academic journals, he has written for Slightly Foxed and The Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Patrick Flanery is a professor of creative writing at Queen Mary University of London and the author of four novels. In his first nonfiction book, he chronicles the arduous four-year journey he and his husband took to try and become parents. For a short time they considered surrogacy, but it is so difficult in the UK that they quickly switched tracks to domestic adoption.

The resulting memoir is a somber, meditative book that doesn’t gloss over the difficulties of queer family-making, but also sees some potential advantages: to an extent, one has the privilege of choice – he and Andrew specified that they couldn’t raise a child with severe disabilities or trauma, but were fine with one of any race – whereas biological parents don’t really have any idea of what they’re going to get. However, same-sex couples are plagued by bureaucracy and, yes, prejudice still. Nothing comes easy. They have to fill out a 50-page questionnaire about their concerns and what they have to offer a child. A social worker humiliates them by forcing them to do a dance-off video game to prove that a pair of introverted, cultured academics can have fun, too.

Eventually there’s a successful match and they have some tentative meetings with four-year-old O—, his parents’ fifth child, now in foster care. But this is not a blithe story of everything going right. I enjoyed the glimpses of Flanery’s growing-up years in Nebraska and the occasional second-person address to O—, but there is a lot more theory and cultural criticism than I expected, and much of the film talk, at least, feels like irrelevant asides.

[Stephen Berwind · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was very much engaged with the Patrick Flanery's account of the process he and his partner Andrew endured to try to be parent's. As a gay man who regrets not having had the chance to be a parent I was on his side. As an American who lived and worked in the UK I recognized the meme of the ginger child and also the difficulty of understanding and negotiating British culture and its class system. While America also has a class system, it does not structure American society in the way the British class system structures the UK. In the UK Americans, and I imagine all non-white British are othered. He is about a generation younger than I am and I was surprised at how much he felt singled out as a gay couple. I did find that a bit of a whinge. The theory chapters were a little dense but comprehensible. The extended film reviews did not engage me. The ending was sad and I empathized. However, I could not escape the gut feeling that he and his partner went into the process of adopting a child with the mind of a consumer. Unable to find a match who would fit into their perfectly managed lives, they abandoned poor O-- and their dream of parenthood. I felt at the end that they had way to many limitations of what they would accept to have ever been sucessful in adoption. This book is definitely worth reading.

[Ryana · Rating 1 out of 5]

How ridiculous to promote a book with a ‘grab’ such as ‘would you take a ginger child?‘ As a redhead ‘Ginger’ I take offense to that! Yes, it is put forward as something shockingly said by someone else, but the author (Flanery) later confirms said feeling [about ginger children] by ludicrously asking his readers If “we might all imagine ourselves as ginger children-fragile, sensitive, more easily hurt than we think possible...” I am not, nor have I ever been labeled as behaving ‘ginger’ and I find it laughable that a gay man promotes this derogatory judgment and stereotyping. I have also struggled with fertility issues and years of treatments, adoption inquiries, and foster caring as have many couples of all kinds. My husband and I are heterosexual and tick all the ‘boxes’ and yes Mr. Flanery, we have also had to fill out 50 page questionnaires about our lives and endured all kinds of intrusions, invasions of privacy and even discriminations. You are not special or harder done by because you are a gay couple - we actually felt that during seven years of fertility treatments we were a minority amongst gay & lesbian couples, who already had at least one child. I do not have a living child after years of heartbreak... If I had have been blessed to have had a ‘ginger’ child by Hell I would have cherished that child and made them proud to be who they are which is ‘unique’ and bolstered them from ridiculous put downs such as yours Mr Flanery - who should know better. This book is a winging, poor me, ‘it’s because I’m gay’ disappointment. I now work with children and when I do come across a little ‘ginger’ I make sure they have the tools they need in life to rage against occurrences such as these.

[Lauryn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I feel a bit strange saying this as this is a memoir so I'm talking about a real person but I thought the narration was so unlikeable! There were some comments in this that I found to be pretty classist, and that's hard for me to move past. for all I know, the author could have reflected on this further on in the book but I had no real interest to stick with it to find out. a really disappointing read, considering this is the first nonfiction book I've found about lgbt+ experiences adopting, and I wanted to like it so badly.

the search continues for good LGBT nonfiction (beyond historical stuff and coming out stories).

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought rating it one star would be harsh, but I think giving it two is generous. For the whole book, I was thinking that the narrator was a little pretentious and the way they spoke about adoption was a very off-putting. For example, the narrator seemed more concerned with how a potential child could serve him and his own needs, rather than the other way around. He kept wanting a child who was 'minimally damaged' (not a direct quote from the book, but this is the general point he kept coming back to, in quotation marks because what the heck even is that??) Spoiler: I was absolutely gobsmacked when I got to the end, and realised that after an entire book centred around adoption, and supposedly centred around 'the ginger child' they did not even adopt the child at the end. And the reasoning was so preposterous I had to re-read it several times. I couldn't believe that someone would actually think about adoption and think about children in this way, much less write an entire book about it, exposing their own narcissistic thoughts, and surely one of the worst things they've ever done (leading a child to believe they were going to be adopted and then dropping out due to frivolous reasons when the child already had attachment/abandonment issues). And the way it is written, it is like the narrator and his husband are the victims? As if they have done nothing wrong to this child?
This is just my opinion, and I know as much and as little as the next person, so please take it with a pinch of salt.

[Irmtraud Ruperta · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book at the local library and chose it really entirely based on the title and book cover. I read it in three days, non-stop. I feel it is a sign of of a highly talented writer to keep a reader spell-bound with a subject matter that has - at first glance - nothing to do with my life. I have no family experience of adoption or of queerness. This is an outstanding book - feel my horizon has been widened significantly. I admire how the author takes on all prejudices fully, I didnt even realise how many unconscious biases I have. I love the authors voice as well - some memoirs are so sugar-coated and full of virtue signalling but Patrick Flanery is truly authentic and likeable. I can totally relate.
Many years ago I read a quote saying that deciding to have children is the opposite of committing suicide and that it is surprising how rarely this feeling is explored in good literature (in the sense of something that you'd read for pleasure on the train). It was in a review of "We need to talk about Kevin" and the writing about Evas thoughts before having Kevin are my favourite parts. This book is exactly what I have been looking for. Its quick and easy to read but it really stays with me.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disappointing ending and much more introspection than expected

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Searingly honest and hard to read at times. We need to think much more deeply about social class in adoption.

[Coley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have very mixed feelings about this book, I did not enjoy reading it by any means but it did get better towards the end, it was very hard to read and although you could tell Patrick was a well educated man I think it could have been written from the root of the story making it much easier to read, rather than flitting between the past, present and story links such as American horror story and books he'd read etc!
At times I found this book boring but wanted to proceed to see how the adoption ended! I was saddened to read the outcome for both Patrick and Andrew, it shocked me that there are still issues in British society today which isolate gay couples, there is too much talk around diversity and not actions!
I also hope that O has found a match in his adoption journey