My “Before”

Sunday 16 August 2026

The book reaches London in five days. I get home two days after it, on the 23rd — the night before school starts, so the parcel will have a head start on me. In the meantime I have read everything about it that exists free online: the publisher’s page, the contents list, the preview of the introduction, two academic reviews I mostly understood, and one I mostly didn’t.

Here is the important thing I already know, and I want to write it down before I get carried away: the book is not about surrogacy.

Nothing in the contents mentions surrogacy, or donor conception, or IVF, or adoption. It is about how the stories ordinary families tell — at dinner, in the car, in the small rituals you don’t notice — shape who children grow up to be. Her research is about ordinary families. My life happens to be an unusually literal example of an idea she built for everyone.

That matters. If I ever tell anyone this book describes us, and they have actually read it, I lose them in one sentence. The honest version — the one I am practising — is: the name borrows her idea. Her book is not about us. The idea just applies to us with unusual force, because for us the co-authoring wasn’t only stories. It was biological, legal, contractual.

If I am honest about that from the start, nobody can catch me pretending later.

Meanwhile, the name. I took a long walk on the beach and made myself generate alternatives, because you should never accept the first candidate without interviewing others: Who Knew Me First, Born Across, The Third Author, In Many Rooms. Each has something. None is quite right.

Co-Authored keeps winning. My reasons, as plainly as I can put them:

• For most people “co-authored” is a metaphor. For us it is almost literal. Other people wrote the start of my story before I arrived.
• It is honest about where it comes from. I am borrowing a phrase that exists, and that will be on the site, not hidden.
• Nothing else is called this. I searched. The closest thing is McLean’s book itself, which is where I got it.
• It will not be embarrassing when I am twenty. Some names age like a haircut. I think this one won’t.

But the decision stays in pencil until I have read the whole book. A preview is a trailer. I have been burned by trailers (Star Wars spin-offs are a testament to this!).

— D.