The Commitment: love, sex, marriage, and my family, by Dan Savage

Published in 2006. 304 p.

Rating: 5 stars

Summary: Dan Savage has a boyfriend of 10 years, a six year old adopted son, and a Catholic mother. So naturally, the conversation turns to marriage. Savage embarks on a cross-country trip to the Midwest for a gay family camp extravaganza in which he has invited all of the members of his immediate family and their spouses/boyfriends/girlfriends/ and children. The end result: his mother convinces him to at least have a tenth anniversary party that could constitute a wedding reception, if there were to be a wedding. But will there be a wedding? Savage looks at the political arena surrounding gay marriage, but also the personal arena for marriage in general, same sex or otherwise.

Review: I love Dan Savage. I really do.

This is yet another of Savage’s hysterically funny, oh so wonderful masterpieces. It is also one of the few memoirs out there that I can actually stand, and just think, I actually enjoyed…loved…it. No Year of Magical Thinking here, this is actually a memoir that can affect those who are not in the same shoes, who might not care until they read Savage’s story.

Savage of course brings in his humor that he has become known for, starting the book with another road trip anecdote, and then moving on to the subject of how it came to be that he has a blind, deaf, one-eyed brown poodle (oh no, I’m not giving it away…you have to read it to find out.)

Family scenes

One of the best things about any Savage novel is the family dynamic that he shows. His family is nuts! I say that coming from a re-diculously weird family. His mother is darling, and the fact that although he has almost entirely shed her Catholic beliefs from his life yet keeps her penchant for expecting disaster is wonderfully refreshing and different. Rather than harp on the minor bad things in life, Savage (and his mother) instead dwell on the really insanely super bad things that could potentially happen, because God will clearly strike down everything good in a persons life (think Biblical Job, here) if that person for one second is happy about things, takes them just a teensy bit for granted, or presumes that things might stay the way they are rather than falling spectacularly apart. Paranoia, anyone?

Seriously though, the idea that God will take away everything good in Savage’s life if he presumes too much about his happy state is a recurrent theme in the book. It is one of the top reasons that he doesn’t want to get married. He is afraid that if he presumes too much about the happy state of his then-current union with Terry, God will kill off one of them (or both of them), or somehow end their relationship, and their marriage will have been for naught. He uses the examples of many celebrities and their short-lived marriages (and takes a great shot at J.Lo,) and tells about one lezzie couple that had been together for ten years, but split up after five days of marriage, but couldn’t get divorced because although laws were made in Canada allowing same-sex marriage, there were no laws for divorce (oops! At least Canada got the sentiment right by allowing the marriages in the first place.)

Terry, on the other hand, isn’t paranoid about God smiting them for getting married. He just doesn’t want to act like straight people. Instead, he wants to get “property of (insert each other’s name here).” WTF? Like that’s not totally jinxed as well (as one of Savage’s brothers, who had his 16 year old girlfriend’s name tatted on his arm at the tender age of 18, pointed out.)

An amusing aside: their 6 year old son, DJ, is against gay marriage. Go figure.

Research into the historical facts surrounding marriage/gay marriage

One of the things I love best about Savage’s novels (besides the humor, and pretty much everything else about the book) is how he incorporates his research into the narrative. Although the book is a memoir, it also has tons of information on the history of marriage, and the political history of gay marriage in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere. Savage does his homework and gives an (albeit very biased) overview of the political arena surrounding gay marriage. He is very well-informed, and passes on a good amount of information to the reader so that the reader can follow Savage’s reasoning about his views on same-sex marriage.

The ending...it’s a surprise ending, that you don’t realize is a surprise ending until you get to the very end of the surprise ending. Confused? It’ll all make sense, when you read the surprise ending. It also happens to be a very well done surprise ending. Bravo, Monsieur Savage. Overall, an awesome book that everyone with a sense of humor should read. Even conservative republicans (because they might learn something.)