How do you define “child” when you’re a queer boy who can’t carry one but wants to anyway?
Growing up, Joseph Osmundson loved the women in his life so much he could imagine fully stepping into their nurturing roles. Like them, he imagined not just raising a “queaby,” or a queer baby, but carrying one himself, in his belly, with Kay, a queer friend he met in college who stayed close into adulthood. He imagined their little one licking batter off the beater, just as he had. He named the kid Fry before there was a kid. Then everyone grew up: Kay partnered with Jaime, and the two asked Joseph to be their sperm donor. All three imagined a future with Fry. Then Kay and her wife ultimately decided they wanted to pursue parenthood in a way that reflected their own racial background, and the future they had imagined with Fry disappeared.
A professor of microbiology at New York University and the author of “Virology,” the critically acclaimed essay collection exploring our relationship with infectious viruses, Osmundson sorts through a deeper, more unspoken grief in the science-meets-memoir book “Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood.” This new work asks a fundamental question: How do you grieve what never was? What makes Fry’s absence complicated is that Osmundson is grieving not only a child, but a version of queer family-making that he once believed was possible. To explore that loss, and how he arrived at the name Fry, he reaches for science — specifically, the life cycle of the salmon.
“For every two hundred fry, ten will survive and become smolts,” he writes in the book, reflecting shortly thereafter that the name started as a joke and then became “a way for two queer kids to say we loved each other without having to say it.”
“A part of writing the book was filling the void,” he tells me recently, explaining why he frequently returns to writing about Fry as a baby fish, using the salmon life cycle to give symbolic shape to his thoughts: spawning, eggs, survival, return, loss. “The grief, in this case, was the absence of a child. And so it felt really important to make an object of that loss — something that could be material in the world.”
“To be able to hold it in my hands,” he says about the book’s existence, “in the way that I both can, but also can’t, hold Fry in my hands.”
Osmundson wrote 400,000 words of fish research for the book — facts, maps of the Columbia River Basin, details about dams, hours spent immersed in the biology of particular Pacific salmon species. It was, he admits, a way to delay confronting what the water represented: a future he wanted but couldn’t have.
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“I would wake up on Saturday and Sunday morning, and the quietness, the silence of my home was oppressive, because I had been planning on spending weekend days in a home with a child,” he says. “I was looking for answers in the rational world to what was functionally an irrational experience, which is grief.”
It is the death of possibility that is being grieved. But for years, even naming that loss felt impossible. Before writing the book, Osmundson struggled to talk about Fry with close friends, worried that putting the experience into words would somehow take away from it.
“If I shared my relationship with my almost-child, she would disappear or wouldn’t be real to me anymore.”
That fear became one of the emotional stakes of writing “Spawning Season.” To put Fry onto the page was to risk exposing something deeply personal — not just the imagined child, but the depth of the grief attached to her. The chapters with Fry, he says, felt “very, very vulnerable” to write. Lonely, too.
“One of the reasons I wrote the book is that I was so isolated through the experience,” he says.
But publishing the book revealed something he didn’t fully understand while living through the loss: that his grief was not as singular as it felt. Readers and strangers began recognizing pieces of themselves in his story — in the children they couldn’t have, the futures that changed, the lives they had imagined differently.
“It turns out that a lot of people see fractures of that experience in their own lives. And it’s actually not lonely at all — it’s just something that we are often taught not to talk about publicly.”
In hindsight, would it have helped him to be more open about Fry with, at the very least, more of his friends? Osmundson responds without regret, with the kind of self-compassion that comes from having moved through the experience rather than simply beyond it.
“Life throws you a lot of really difficult experiences,” he says. “And frankly, I wasn’t sharing with people because I was in denial, and I was bargaining. And so I couldn’t accept the loss in myself, and therefore I couldn’t go to anyone to help process that loss. It was a loss that I wasn’t ready to believe was actually happening. I’m really tender to the person that went through this experience in the past.”