All the Ways Home: Parenting and Children in the Lesbian and Gay Communities - A Collection of Short Fiction

by Cindy Rizzo

Every family is knitted together by stories. This imaginative and compelling collection tells the stories that bind gay and lesbian families. They are stories we have never heard before. Millions of gay and lesbian parents, and their children, are living a quiet revolution simply by creating families. All the Ways Home tells us of the courage, ordinariness, fears, and trials of these families. In the process, it shatters the cultural divide between gay and lesbian people and the broader society -Urvashi Vaid

212 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

Cindy Rizzo lives in New York City with her wife, Jennifer, and the requisite two cats issued to every lesbian household (well, most). She has worked in philanthropy for many years and has a long history of involvement in the LGBT community, including membership on the founding board of Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), the organization that first brought marriage equality to the US. In the 1970s and 1980s she wrote for Boston’s Gay Community News and has published essays in the anthologies, Lesbians Raising Sons and Homefronts: Controversies in Non-Traditional Parenting. She was the co-editor of a fiction anthology, All the Ways Home, published in 1995 (New Victoria) in which her story “Herring Cove” was included. She serves on the boards of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in New York and Funders for LGBT Issues. She and her wife have two grown sons, a wonderful daughter-in-law, and a baby granddaughter.

Reviews

[Zach Strassburger · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me a LONG time to finish this book. I wanted the stories to be real because all of the stories felt real, and they weren’t. The book is old and felt somewhat outdated but it is hard to pin down exactly why. It’s all about lgb life and coming out and things are just different now. There was a story at the end that I really liked, about teenagers who had grown up in gay families bringing their straight friends to a gay beach. That story made the book worth reading but also, you could skip to that one!!

[Rasak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although stories are very different in quality, they manage to portray struggles on LGBTQIA+ families in an understandable manner and are easy to relate to. Some stories, in my opinion, are too sentimental, but they show very diverse families and from most angles you can imagine. So my general opinion is good and books like this is very needed.