Maybe everything’s not exactly coming up roses for Andrea in Portland, but, now twenty four, she has made a life for herself there. Check, please.Ĭhelsey Johnson - image taken from her site But when Mom and Dad, heavily Catholic, learned that she had a girlfriend, parental funding for Reed was axed, and Andrea was urged to return home and pray away the gay. In fact, she soon found herself part of a thriving lesbian sub-culture. Unlike the environment in her Nebraska home town, Portland offered a world in which it was entirely ok to be gay and out. Andrea Morales came to Portland, Oregon, to attend Reed College. I’d nested in old selves for too long, afraid I’d need them again. I was like a bird who stashed every feather it molted. 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.Ī 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.Ī 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. 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. 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. 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.Īll of us were refugees of the nuclear family.

Stray city by chelsey johnson