My “Before”

Thursday 10 September 2026

Two weeks of Grade 10 done. The book is finished. I read it in the gaps — bus, breaks, the twenty minutes before sleep that are supposed to be for not-thinking.

Verdict, now that I have read all of it and not just the trailer: everything I guessed from the preview holds, and one thing got deeper.

What holds: it is not about surrogacy. Not one page. It is about ordinary families and the stories they tell, and how children build themselves out of those stories. My honest sentence survives contact with the full book: the name borrows her idea; her book is not about us; the idea applies to us with unusual force.

What got deeper: the book gave me a better way to say why it applies with unusual force. McLean writes about how you can’t fully understand your own story without the people who hold the other pieces of it. For most people, the other pieces are held by parents and grandparents at the dinner table. For people like me, some of the pieces are held by a woman in Lancaster, a stranger whose name I don’t fully know, and a filing cabinet in a California attorney office. The co-authors are real, findable, and mostly silent. That is the exact gap the project lives in.

So tonight the pencil became a pen. I copied the name from the back page of the holiday notebook onto a fresh Post-It and put it on my desk, under the first one — the one that still says A website. By kids. For kids. Surrogacy-born kids.

The second Post-It says Co-Authored.

There will be a tagline eventually. The one I keep coming back to is we don’t write our stories alone. That isn’t a slogan. That’s just the truth.

— D.