The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined

There are stories of marriages in crisis, and then there’s Wayne Scott’s The Maps They Gave Us, which is nothing short of miraculous. He rejects the familiar turns, respects the mysteries of process to offer an experience that feels utterly naked and alive. Vulnerable, candid, and expansive, this book is both a tribute to distinctive relationships and—astonishing surprise—a manual for how to love.
—Paul Lisicky, author of Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell

The Maps They Gave Us invents nothing short of a new cartography for human relationships. Diving deeply down into the stories we have been told about how to be men, women, fathers, mothers, feminists, queer, Wayne Scott’s story of queer emergence achieves exactly what Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving Into the Wreck” did: a new way to experience ourselves by understanding gender and sexuality as more fluid and profound than we’ve been told. I laughed, I cried, I turned inside out, remembering that desire, identity, and family can be any story we want them to be if we open our hearts back up to adaptation and evolution.
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Thrust and The Chronology of Water

Bravo to Wayne Scott for offering his true story of liberation from outdated scripts that ask us to lop off vital portions of ourselves in the name of Family, Manhood, and Fatherhood. The Maps They Gave Us is a gift to the world, which is desperate for stories that expand the narrow confines of desire, gender, sexuality, identity, and possibility. And most astonishing and revolutionary of all, Scott offers a new, emancipatory vision of family, one that is expansive enough for ever-evolving desire, no matter how complicated.

—Christie A. Tate, author of Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life