• FILLS A GAP IN THE MARKET: There is a dearth of memoirs about motherhood written by Black women; Black queer motherhood memoirs are virtually nonexistent. This book is an opportunity to bridge that gap, and Royster is a powerful writer whose motherhood journey will resonate with many readers who do not see themselves represented.
• AUTHOR CONNECTIONS: The author has a burgeoning network of writers who she will call upon to help with promotion, including Salamishah Tillet, Cheryl L. West, Haki Madhubuti, Nadine Kenney Johnstone, Miles Harvey, and more.
• INTERSECTIONAL AND INTERDISCIPLINARY: Choosing Familycombines a powerful personal narrative with queer theory and criticism to discuss adoption and parenthood from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective.
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 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 forties and fifties. 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.