I'm on the Modern Love podcast!Plus: I spoke with Rebecca Carroll about interracial adoption, there's an excerpt from my book in the Guardian, and it's almost pub day.
It’s just five more days until my book, My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past, is out in the world and the media blitz has begun. First up: I’m on the Modern Love podcast talking with Anna Martin about my family’s story. There’s also a transcript of the interview on the New York Times, along with some family photos—including the first photo my sister Kathy and I ever took together. I have not yet fully processed this!
If you’re new here: My book is about a DNA test connecting me with my sister Kathy, who my mom placed for adoption at a home for unwed mothers in the sixties, twenty years before I was born. I set out to understand what had happened back in 1965 and stumbled on a bigger story—about family secrets, shame, race, the control of women’s bodies, and everything that we inherit from our mothers in a world that hates them. In these days before publication, it would be so meaningful if you took a moment to pre-order My Mother’s Daughter. Pre-orders are profoundly importantly for setting a book up for success. Grab a copy (or two) now and help me launch this book into the world so that it can make a real impact. I also have an exclusive excerpt in the Guardian about how my mom was sent away in shame and I turned shame into my career as a journalist covering the sex beat. I always saw this juxtaposition as an ironic coincidence, or a testament to generational change, until I started digging into my mom’s past.
And I just wrapped a Substack Live with the cultural critic Rebecca Carroll, the author of the memoir Surviving the White Gaze, which is in part about her childhood growing up with white adoptive parents as the only black person in a rural town in New Hampshire. Rebecca writes about “being ushered through” her childhood via “the powerful passport of white privilege,” her white adoptive parents’ willful avoidance of conversations about race, and having her blackness actively undermined by her white biological mother. I read Rebecca’s book when I was in the process of writing my book. My mother was white—I’m white—and my sister is mixed race and was adopted by a Black family. Surviving the White Gaze helped to underscore for me just what it meant for my sister to be raised by a Black adoptive mother who affirmed her identity—but Rebecca’s work has also been more broadly influential on my thinking around race, parenting, feminism, and so much else. I hope you’ll give a listen to our conversation below—it is rich and wide-ranging and vitally necessary. If you aren’t already familiar with Rebecca’s book, I highly recommend that you go pick up a copy to read alongside mine. 
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