Growing up with a Colombian father for whom magical realism was a way of life made ordinary reality feel like an immigrant experience for author Jose Chaves, who was born in the U.S. but, as his father would insist, made in Colombia That experience comes alive like a movie on the page in The Contract of Love, a memoir about family that is both hilarious and heartbreaking. Chaves' straightforward style turns the familiar exotic and makes the unfamiliar feel like home as he takes readers on a cultural journey from small-town, muscle-car America to the Chaves family farm in Colombia, where the cow is named Lyndon Johnson, and an emotional journey from his father's volatile world where unrequited love is sung out loud in restaurants, to a fraternity where the most important rule is to never reveal your feelings to another guy in public. With tenderness, humor, and hypnotic clarity, Chaves explores the landscape of love that holds us together, beyond the addictions that bind us-- from the broken faith that sends a boy spiraling down, to the grace that finds the man.