Staying Power: On Queerness, Inheritances, and the Families We Choose

By Zena Sharman

A remarkably frank memoir about interdependence, grieving, and parenting as a queer femme that doesn't leave out the messy or the erotic

Staying Power, Zena Sharman's memoir in essays, is a beautiful and honest journey of care work, grief, parenting, and chosen family in the wake of intergenerational trauma. Exploring the lessons and inheritances of being raised by survivors of complex traumas, the book challenges the notion that one must be healed in order to parent well and celebrates the transformative power of queer family-making beyond gay marriage and assimilation into the nuclear family.

The book, which recounts the author's experiences of raising three children in a four-parent queer family, asks, "If leaving has helped you survive, how do you learn to stay?" Sharman finds answers in queer kinship, femme erotics, leatherdyke lineages, and the radical possibilities inherent in doing motherwork outside of motherhood, recognizing that sometimes you fight the thing you want most.

Staying Power is a moving, deeply personal account of one person's journey of unlearning independence through an experiment in queer collective care.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1834050162
• ISBN13: 9781834050164
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Length: 192 Pages