Adopting Serenity

A screenwriter and stand-up comic’s riotous, meta-fictional memoir detailing a high-stakes adoption journey involving addiction, suicide attempts, and a literal baby-napping plot that proves family is worth every obstacle

After years of unsuccessful attempts to get pregnant, anxious actor and screenwriter Chris Pentzell and wife, Lisa Hall, are presented with a compelling adoption opportunity – the birth mother of Chris’s brother’s son is pregnant and looking for adoptive parents. If they say yes, their daughter would be the biological half-sibling of their nephew. Chris and Lisa jump at the chance.

What follows is a series of dramatic twists and turns that include drug addiction, threats of violence, wavering consent, competing relatives, interstate law, financial strain, and the helpless experience of having no control over the health and well-being of their future daughter.

Told with self-deprecating humor, shameless tangents, mock conversations, a rebuttal from his wife, and a chapter written in the style of Jane Austen, Adopting Serenity is a funny, frantic, and candid memoir about the determination to create a family no matter what.