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Book cover reveal!

There she is, 'My Mother's Daughter,' which is now officially available for pre-order.

Tracy Clark-Flory

Oct 30

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*My Mother’s Daughter, coming May 5, 2026.*

My book has a cover! I’m so happy to get to share it with you all first.

Outside of my closest family members and publishing team, you—newsletter subscribers, real ones—are the first people to see it. You’re also the first people to get the pre-order link for the book, which is called My Mother’s Daughter and comes out May 5, 2026.

It’s about finding my sister through a DNA test, trying to understand our mom’s past, and uncovering a bigger story—about shame, family secrets, race, and the control of women’s bodies.

Pre-orders mean everything for a book’s success. It tells booksellers that people want to read it and shows my publisher that this book is going somewhere. The first five people to order my book get a free yearlong paid subscription to this newsletter. If you’re already a paid subscriber, I’ll comp you a year. Just hit “reply” to this email with a copy of your receipt.

Here’s the full book jacket description:

From the journalist and author of Want Me (an NPR Best Book of the Year) comes a “tender, revelatory, and deeply moving” (Amanda Montei, Touched Out) story of family secrets, sisterhood, and the importance of untangling all that we inherit from our mothers.

Tracy Clark-Flory had a sister out there, somewhere. She knew that her mom, Deb, was sent to a home for unwed mothers as a pregnant teenager in the Sixties. After placing her baby for adoption, Deb was committed to a mental institution in her grief. Decades later, she had Tracy, who grew up as an only child longing for her sister.
Now, in her thirties and a mother herself, Tracy takes a DNA test in hopes of finding her sister—and she does.

Newly connected with her half-sister Kathy, both daughters start asking questions about the past that their mom, who had died years earlier, could no longer answer. Tracy sets out to make sense of what happened back in 1965. She learns that their mom was pulled into a racist and sexist system designed to turn “bad girls” into proper women and wives.
Tracy realizes that her own life has been profoundly shaped by her mom’s past, but she also uncovers a bigger story about patriarchal control, mother-daughter dynamics, and the way that shame keeps us divided—both within ourselves and from each other.
Blending powerful memoir with cultural criticism, My Mother’s Daughter is a moving, intimate tale of traumatic inheritance and intergenerational healing.

I think the cover does a great job of conveying some of that story.

The family photo up top is of me as a baby in the eighties with my mom. We’re sitting on the front steps of our house in Berkeley, California. The photo toward the bottom of the cover is a school portrait from the seventies of Kathy, who was raised by her adoptive parents in Chicago, Illinois.¹

Those two illustrated faces? It’s open to interpretation, but mine is that they represent Kathy’s two moms. Her birth mother—our shared mom—and Marguerite, the mother who raised her. It’s also gestures toward the fracturing of womanhood into dichotomous categories. Good or bad. Wife or whore. Virgin or slut. Mother or lover.

That dividing line is an essential part of this book, but the story ultimately lands in a place of incorporation. It’s about reclaiming those parts of ourselves, and our family stories, that are hidden away.

This cover is the first time that all three of us have been pictured together—and now we’ll be in bookstores across the country. My mom, the daughter she raised, and the daughter she never even got to meet. I don’t have the adequate words for this—maybe I’ll find them over the next six months before the book comes out.

For now, I hope you’ll pre-order and help launch this book into the world with me.

When I asked Kathy if she was OK with having her face on the cover, she wrote: “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!? You must not know that I have always felt I should and deserve to be famous!!! 🤣🤣🤣❤️.”

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