A Family Story With A Twist: New Memoir Presents A ‘Snapshot Of An American Family’

For over a century, one Chatham house has served as the gathering spot for five generations of a family.

This is the house, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1972, that Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis bought in 1922 and enjoyed until his death in 1941.

In his new memoir “Good Morning Moon: A Snapshot of an American Family” (HarperCollins, 2026), best-selling author Brad Gooch describes how his husband, Paul Raushenbush, Brandeis’ great-grandson, invited Gooch to this house early in their relationship. On his first night in the house Gooch believed he saw a ghost in his bedroom, “a male ghost, a bit like a cloud embodied with a face within the room.”

 Raushenbush’s relatives still ask Gooch about the ghost. He has not seen it again, he said during a recent telephone interview.

 The day after the ghost sighting Gooch met Raushenbush’s parents, Walter and Marylu. The visit went well. “Whether we knew or not, the theme whistling just below consciousness in those first months was family,” he writes.

 In his memoir, Gooch offers a poignant tale about how he and Raushenbush became the parents, in late middle age, of two boys.

 This is a memoir about not knowing where life might take you and the miraculous surprises that lie in store. “The last time I checked, I was a gay guy living alone on the top floor of a brownstone in SoHo,” is the book’s opening line. Then, “the next time I checked, I was married to a man, Paul, and we lived in a prewar yellow brick co-op in Chelsea… I was 60.” And then? “And then the strangest thing happened, a tale too amazing not to be told. Paul and I had two children.”

 After the children were born, “I have discovered that I am a person who likes to get down on the floor and play make-believe blocks and assemble dinosaur puzzles for hours,” Gooch writes.

 Gooch describes the process of surrogacy, which is somewhat cumbersome as it involves not only doctors, lawyers and psychologists but also carefully chosen hired surrogates and egg donors. The vetting process is complex. Matching with a surrogate is somewhat like “friending” on Facebook — both parties must accept the other.

 “I don’t think either of us understood the process we were getting into — medically and scientifically,” Gooch says of himself and Raushenbush.

The two gestational surrogates were first a woman from a conservative Southern military family and then the wife of an oil rigger. Kathy, the egg donor for both boys, was a Stanford graduate student. Gooch and Raushenbush traveled to Las Vegas to witness Walter’s birth and then, three and a half years later, to Oklahoma City for Glenn’s birth.

 Gooch’s title is a nod to Margaret Wise Brown’s famous children’s picture book “Goodnight Moon,” a book he often chose to read aloud to the boys at bedtime. As it turns out, after Daddy and Papa, “moon” was the first word uttered by Walter.

 And the memoir’s subtitle is partly a comment on how we remember things in snapshots, and partly “soft politics.”

 “There are many kinds of American families,” Gooch says. He notes that when he and Raushenbush were first considering children, “everything was on the positive upswing.” (Same sex marriage was legalized nationally in June 2015.) “Now we see everything can be changed and questioned.”

He says that the memoir “functions as a gay/straight alliance.” While it speaks to “young, queer people thinking of having kids,” he says, children are universal. “All parents kind of respond to that.” “Good Morning Moon” is as much a book about the joys, challenges and fears of parenting as it is specifically about parenting by two dads.

 In keeping with long tradition, each summer Walter and Glenn spend about a month in Chatham at the gathering spot for Raushenbush’s siblings and their families. “It’s great for our kids because that’s their experience with extended family,” Gooch says.

 In what functions as a subplot of the fatherhood discovery story, Gooch took a DNA test that was a stocking stuffer gift from Raushenbush. The test results were shocking and give the book its second big surprise. As someone remarked to Gooch, “Good Morning Moon” “suddenly became a page turner.”

When the test results came back, Gooch learned that he was 52 percent Ashkenazi Jewish. This led to further investigations, during which Gooch realized that the man who he believed was his father as he grew up as an only child in Wilkes-Barre, Penn. was not his father. So, who was his father? Through further sleuthing, Gooch narrowed it down to one of three local Jewish men. Just as he was learning what it means to be a father, Gooch ruminates about his own father, and fatherhood in general. He now feels closer to the man he called “Dad” than he did when the man was alive.

 “He had been my dad, biological or not,” he says.

 Gooch will speak with journalist Pat Kearns about “Good Morning Moon” at East End Books in Provincetown on Thursday, July 30 at 6 p.m. The audience will be both live and remote, through the East End Books Facebook page. Tickets (for both live and remote audiences) are available through www.EastEndBooksPtown.com.