This 2021 novel follows three storylines. Lila, a social worker in her forties, adopted as a child, is now trying to become a mother herself. Tess and Emily, a lesbian couple, pursued parenthood through sperm donation, but have since separated and are fighting over ownership and disposition of the embryos they created together. And Adam, the anonymous sperm donor whose genetic material connects these families, is being held captive in Somalia, where his career as a spy has taken him. Each is forced to reckon with what they owe the people their choices have brought into being.
DCP Stories Collection
- Book – Fiction
- Age 18+ (adult)
- Camille Gibbs
- Sperm Donor
The Relatives
Review
What We Like
- Tess and Emily’s fight over their embryos after separation is one of the more underexplored legal and ethical questions in donor conception.
What Bothers Us
- There is no donor-conceived point of view in this book. Gibb used a sperm donor to conceive her own child, and has said directly that the DCP story belongs to someone else to tell, not to her. We respect the instinct behind that, but the novel ends up reproducing the exact asymmetry the DCP community spends its time pushing back against: adults’ feelings about donor conception getting far more narrative real estate than DCP experience of it.
