Choosing Family
A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance is a brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicago’s North and South Sides.
As a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family’s world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife, Annie, who’s white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their 40s and 50s. Choosing Family chronicles this journey to motherhood while examining the messiness and complexity of adoption and parenthood from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective. Royster also explores her memories of the matriarchs of her childhood and the homes these women created in Chicago’s South Side—itself a dynamic character in the memoir—where “family” was fluid, inclusive, and not necessarily defined by marriage or other socially recognized contracts.
Calling upon the work of some of her favorite queer thinkers, including José Esteban Muñoz and Audre Lorde, Royster interweaves her experiences and memories with queer and gender theory to argue that many Black families, certainly her own, have historically had a “queer” attitude toward family: configurations that sit outside the white normative experience and are the richer for their flexibility and generosity of spirit. A powerful, genre-bending memoir of family, identity, and acceptance, Choosing Family, ultimately, is about joy—about claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Motherhood has been one way to change the narrative of the disposability of Black life," writes Royster (Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions) in her affecting memoir. Royster, a Chicago-born queer African American woman, met her partner at the age of 32; after 13 years together, they adopted a Black child because they both were "aware of the ways that Black children had been left behind in this country." In 2012, after passing screenings, applications, and home checks, the couple brought their daughter, Cece, home. Royster details the anxiety she felt as a Black woman raising a Black girl in what she viewed as a white supremacist society ("How can we give Cece a story about herself that counters these deeply held prejudices?") and how parenthood helped her consider her own mother in a new light ("I've faced the fact that there are key parts of my mother that I didn't know"). She also discusses the Black Lives Matter movement and her decision to not march with protestors in the summer of 2016 because she feared dying and "not being there for Cece." Insightful and reflective, this is a moving tribute to the power of chosen family.
