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Cover of Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance

Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance

by Francesca T. Royster

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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.…

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"Francesca T. Royster and her wife, Annie, decide they want to raise a child when they’re in their 40s and 50s respectively. Overwhelmed and awed by this desire, Royster, who is Black, and Annie, who is white, consider the most ethical way they can do so. In what is both a memoir and a work of accessible queer theory, Royster explores how Black families have historically needed to reinvent the institution. Indeed, Royster finds in her own family history, and its many and varied matriarchs, a kind of roadmap for her own coming parenthood."
NPR Books We Love — 2023 · apps.npr.org