A warm, funny, and whip-smart debut novel about rebellious youth, inconceivable motherhood, and the complications of belonging--to a city, a culture, and a family--when none of them can quite contain who you really are.
All of us were refugees of the nuclear family . . .
Twenty-three-year-old artist Andrea Morales escaped her Midwestern Catholic childhood--and the closet--to create a home and life for herself within the thriving but insular lesbian underground of Portland, Oregon. But one drunken night, reeling from a bad breakup and a friend´s betrayal, she recklessly crosses enemy lines and hooks up with a man. To her utter shock, Andrea soon discovers she´s pregnant--and despite the concerns of her astonished circle of gay friends, she decides to have the baby.
A decade later, when her precocious daughter Lucia starts asking questions about the father she´s never known, Andrea is forced to reconcile the past she hoped to leave behind with the life she´s worked so hard to build.
A thoroughly modern and original anti-romantic comedy, Stray City is an unabashedly entertaining literary debut about the families we´re born into and the families we choose, about finding yourself by breaking the rules, and making bad decisions for all the right reasons.