American fallout

the long version

"For Avery Cullins-- library archivist, one- time teenage runaway, and gay man from a small Southern town--"family" means a live-in boyfriend and a surly turtle. But when his father, a renowned nuclear physicist, commits suicide, Avery's decade-long estrangement with his mother, who now suffers from dementia, comes to an end. With his boyfriend's help, Avery takes custody of his mother and, in a rented U-Haul, the trio heads cross country, back to an apartment in Cleveland and an uncertain future. The journey soon becomes a pilgrimage into the past as Avery sifts through his mother's mementos and a story of love, family, and loss emerges as his parents make a home, lose a child, and test the boundaries of marital love in the 1970s. Meanwhile, Avery must confront his own struggle with a mother who doesn't recognize him and a lover who, despite his cries to the contrary, is growing older, closer, and more domestic" --