All about the Benjamins

Meet the Benjamins. It has been less than a year since Susan Benjamin succumbed to cancer and her family has yet to come to terms with her death--and their own secrets. Her daughter Amy, reeling from a divorce, struggles to parent her teenaged son without controlling him as her own mother had done. Her son Adam, thirtysomething and gay, feels untethered in his mother's absence and drifts through a series of unrewarding jobs and relationships even though he craves love and...
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Meet the Benjamins.

It has been less than a year since Susan Benjamin succumbed to cancer and her family has yet to come to terms with her death--and their own secrets. Her daughter Amy, reeling from a divorce, struggles to parent her teenaged son without controlling him as her own mother had done. Her son Adam, thirtysomething and gay, feels untethered in his mother's absence and drifts through a series of unrewarding jobs and relationships even though he craves love and stability. Her husband Joel, father of Amy and Adam, is fifty-eight and about to come out for the first time as a gay man.

Joel's coming out is at the center of All About the Benjamins, Zev Good's first novel, and is, ultimately, what forces the family to confront uncomfortable truths about themselves and each other while they try to accept what no one could have prepared for: their father is gay and was unfaithful to their mother for the course of their thirty-eight year marriage. As he did in his short story collection, A Map of the World, Zev Good offers a nuanced, tender, and often darkly comic view into loss, identity, and the unbreakable bonds of family.