Buying Dad: One Woman’s Search for the Perfect Sperm Donor

What do two nice Jewish girls do when they want to start a family? They can marry two nice Jewish boys, or, if they happen to be lesbians, they can buy sperm online from California! Buying Dad is a hilarious, edgy, first–person chronicle of a year in the life of a woman engaged in a very alternative family-planning experience. Peeling back the layers of self-indulgence accumulated in 30-odd years as a self-proclaimed gay, childless, albeit happy neurotic, Harlyn Aizley takes the reader on one of the most personal, intimate and utterly female journeys any woman, gay or straight, can make-that of becoming a mother. Aizley’s story begins with the search for sperm-known or unknown donor? Delivered on dry ice or in a nitrogen tank? The journey unfolds within the context of her relationship with her female partner, her mother’s cancer diagnosis, the threat of her own possible infertility and finally pregnancy itself. Aizley’s wry voice and candid prose embrace this confluence of major life events with the humor and wisdom that make Buying Dad accessible to any woman who ever considered ending a lifetime of sleep-filled nights and becoming a parent. Harlyn Aizley ‘s fiction and poetry have been seen in Cups, Caffeine, Inside, Dialogue and The South Carolina Review as well as the anthologies Love Shook My Heart, Scream When You Burn and Beginnings . Her nonfiction has appeared in Boston Magazine and the anthologies The Best American Neurotica and Mondo Barbie Redux . She is a graduate of Brandeis University and holds a master’s degree in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. A native of New Jersey, she currently lives in the Boston area.