How We Met Your Mother

Nominated for the 2024 Finlandia Prize

An autobiographical story about a gay couple’s journey to co-parenting

After eight years together, Kaj and Niko, living in Helsinki, decide to try to become parents. They start dating women, but the search for a co-parent seems impossible at first. What has to be right so that one could dare trust a complete stranger? Whose sperm cells should be used? How do you plan the future of a family that is outside the norms, in a society that is still coded heterosexually?

Kaj Korkea-aho’s autobiographical text about how three parents had a child is irresistibly touching, painful, and humorous. It bears traces of all forms of expression mastered by Korkea-aho - novel, podcast, blog, and drama - and can also be used as a kind of handbook for others in the same life situation. The book grabs the reader like a baby with its little hand and doesn’t let go until the book has been finished and the wonder of life has become a fact.

One of the best books of the year. It is vividly told and touching, a bright account of one of the most exciting projects in a person's life, namely having a child. [Korkea-aho] has found a level of honesty, but also of distance and focus, which gives the reader space and time to go through his own thoughts about partnership and rainbow families, about family formation in general.
 –Taika Dahlblom, Helsingin Sanomat newspaper

The description of Kaj and Niko's meetings with the various women is both amusing and disturbing - a bit like in the American sitcom How I Met Your Mother, to which the title of the book clearly alludes. [HOW WE MET YOUR MOTHER] is a book born out of a lack of books about co-parenting and male couples trying to become fathers, but the text grows into a universal story about longing for children, and a story of parenthood.
  –Marit Lindqvist, Svenska YLE