Maybe not the best book to read during a pandemic. It is beautifully written. Cunningham loves his characters and fully inhabits them; he loves each of them in different ways. The story has a lot of elements to it. It is a story about how difficult for anyone who is different in any way (not just gay) to find himself and fit in when society is based around the threesome of father mother and child. But then he also flips the equation and describes the loneliness of being only defined as a member of that confined threesome cut off from all other society. And there is the theme that family is ultimately what you decide it is -- found people who love and accept you and make a home with you. In a funny twist, the found family of friends in the book toy with a family parody where they call themselves "the Hendersons." Each one has a tragic, difficult familial background story and they yearn for a kind of Norman Rockwell family while also rejecting it. And, finally, it is a story about life and death and how the dead can inhabit (and inhibit) the living.