Brad Gooch has spent much of his career illuminating other people’s lives: Frank O’Hara, Flannery O’Connor, Rumi, Keith Haring. In Good Morning Moon, the biographer finally turns his archival patience on his own household, and the result reads less like confession than like curation — a family album assembled by someone who understands exactly how much a single snapshot can hold, and similarly, how much it conceals.
The book opens at a gallop. In a compressed overture, Gooch sketches the death of his first great love during the AIDS crisis and the improbable second act of meeting Paul, the man he would eventually marry. Only then does the memoir settle into its central story: two men in late middle age deciding, against every expectation of their generation, to have children through surrogacy. Their sons become the book’s animating presences, and Gooch’s prose is most alive at their thresholds. Of the delivery room where his son Walter is born, he writes: “These stark medical settings where we come together for births and deaths are like no other, extremely well lit — and terrifying — staging areas for unlit mysteries.” It is a sentence that could serve as the book’s epigraph. Gooch’s instinct, honed over decades of writing biography, is always to notice the darkness that the brightest light organizes itself around.
The memoir’s deepest subject is time, or rather, the incompatible speeds at which a life progresses. Reflecting on his father’s death, Gooch observes, “If kid time is fast, death time is slow.” The entire book is built on that axis — childhood accelerates past the parent who tries to fix it in memory, while grief refuses to move at all. Fatherhood and mourning are usually treated as separate literatures, but Gooch insists they are one subject: raising the living and carrying the dead are the same act of attention performed at two different tempos. Even the title stages the collision, a morning greeting addressed to the night’s leftover moon.
This double clock also governs the book’s structure. Even as Gooch documents fatherhood going forward, becoming a parent compels him to look backwards, into his own boyhood as an only child in small-town Pennsylvania and toward an unlit mystery of his own: a family secret hiding, well-lit, in plain sight. When the revelation arrives late in the book, it lands not as a twist, but as a lens. “How much of me did he know or sense?” Gooch asks of a man long dead, and the question ripples backward through everything that precedes it, demanding that his childhood be reread for what was there all along. It is the memoir’s most quietly devastating effect: death time reaching back into kid time and rewriting it.
Jewish readers will find familiar terrain here: the conviction that a family is constituted by story as much as by blood; the obligation to carry the memory of a devastated generation while raising a new one; the question of what the living owe the dead when they choose life so abundantly. At a moment when the definition of family is again contested ground, Gooch’s insistence that chosenness can bind as tightly as inheritance carries a resonance this community will recognize in its bones.
In fewer than two hundred pages, Gooch, with a poet’s sensibility, shows that kid time and death time are always working in tandem throughout a life, sometimes heartbreakingly so, often with a wonder and a magic that helps the invisible become apparent.
Shamar Hill, an Ashkenazi and Black writer, is the recipient of numerous awards, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Cave Canem fellowship, and a fellowship from Fine Arts Work Center. He is working on a memoir and poetry collection.
