The Sperm Donor's Daughter and Other Tales of Modern Family

""I make up terms now, and I think former is nicer than ex: ex-wife, ex-step-brother, ex-step-sister-father-mother. That is if you want to keep them in your permanent collection."" The permanent collections of scattered families haunt the six stories of this muted debut about characters who search, mostly in vain, for relationships with which to anchor their lives. A lonely woman mulls over her affectionate but ominous childhood with her brother. A married woman ends the affair that promised love instead of security. A widower makes a second go at marriage in the shadow of his first wife's suicide. The bulk of the book is made up of the title novella, in which a 20-year-old pregnant woman discovers the truth about her father and leaves home in search of her past. Although Trueblood relies too much on roughly indistinguishable, self-pitying points of view and maudlin turns of phrase, she surprises even the impatient reader with the occasional well-observed image: ""Wood smoke chugs from the chimneys without making a difference to the sky: gray, gone gray, all gray""--a phrase that describes all-too-well the heart of this collection. (Apr.)