Desperate Love: A Father’’s Memoir

In this searing memoir, a father confronts the complex issues of love and hate as he struggles to deal with his emotionally troubled and often violent son. Desperate Love examines the lengths that parents go to preserve their families and rescue children from themselves. Often gritty and occasionally funny, this extraordinary memoir follows one father's quest for love, faith, redemption and understanding in a life beleaguered with infertility, adoption and adolescent aggression.

Richard Reiss began his professional writing career at the Piscataway-Dunellen Review, a Forbes newspaper, for which he wrote and was recognized by the New Jersey Press Association for his humor column, Reiss’s Pieces. Over the next twenty five years he developed his skills as a professional fundraiser working primarily for colleges and universities. During that period he also wrote extensively about creating a family through adoption, and the joys and challenges of being adoptive parents. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, ADDitude Magazine, Perigee Literary Journal, and in the anthology, Upstart Crows II: True Stories, published by Wide Array Press. In 2008 Reiss collaborated with director and lyricist, Martin Charnin, to create the musical revue Love is Love. He is a lifetime resident of New Jersey where he lives with his wife and three children.