What I've Been Writing/What I've Been Reading
A semi-regular update
Happy almost-spring! Our Eastern Redbud tree out front is starting to bud, my allergies are revving up, and I have some belated publication news to share, as well as some reading recs.
First, I was absolutely thrilled to make my debut in The New York Review of Books about a month ago, with an essay on the stories about “bad” mothers we are comfortable imagining ourselves into, and the reality we are reluctant to pay attention to, by way of Jessamine Chan’s best-selling novel The School for Good Mothers and sociologist Kelley Fong’s superb work of research Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services. Outside of my book deal, this has been the highlight of my career—they even put me on the cover!
I was also really pleased to be able to review Deborah Taffa Jackson’s memoir Whiskey Tender for The Washington Post (gift link). Fun fact: writers pretty much never get to write their own headlines, but I’m a huge fan of what my editor chose for this one. I truly believe Whiskey Tender is going to be remembered as one of the classic memoirs of our time.
That WaPo review came out while I was finishing up a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where I was lucky enough to spend ten uninterrupted days working on edits on my book. I revised about two-thirds of it there, and am finishing up the remaining chapters at home now. Thanks to my editor Anu for the incredibly useful feedback; to VCCA for the time, space, and food (!); and to my cohort of fellows for the inspiration and chats.
BTW, the book’s new title is The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood, and it’s due out in January 2025! Soon we will have a cover. What wild times!
A few reading recs!
First, I was thrilled to be able to attend an event here in Philly for sociologist Gretchen Sisson’s new book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. This is a hugely important book that anyone interested in reproductive justice and child welfare ought to read. Toward the beginning of Relinquished, Sisson points out that private domestic infant adoption has long been “one of the few bipartisan areas of political agreement.” But it's only possible to believe that adoption is in everyone's best interest if you ignore a crucial perspective—that of birth mothers.
In Relinquished, Sisson draws on more than a hundred interviews with women who have placed infants for domestic adoption, busting both conservative and liberal myths. She proves that adoption is not an alternative to abortion—nearly all people who are denied abortions choose to parent—nor is it a practice cleansed of a long history of injustice, coercion, and grief. By centering the stories of women who relinquished infants between 2000 and 2020, Sisson picks up where books like Ann Fassler’s 2006 The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade left off. She argues that domestic infant adoption is fundamentally unjust and that it thrives because we are so unwilling to look critically at “what types of motherhood, which children, and whose families are most valued by our society.”
In other child welfare book news, Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America is now out in paperback! I wrote about it last year for The Atlantic (gift link) and have been so pleased to see the accolades it has racked up, including a nomination for a National Book Critics Circle Award. I’m in the NBCC but not on any award committees, but I’m nevertheless rooting for Roxanna to win this week!
I wrote here last year about war “orphans” that Russia was kidnapping from Ukraine. In Gaza, many children have actually become orphans because of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing and siege of the strip. Many of these children have themselves been wounded by air strikes, causing doctors to coin a horrific new term to identify them: WCNSF, or “Wounded Child, No Surviving Family.” Here’s a BBC article on these children from December, and a more recent Al Jazeera feature that cites a UNICEF report on the scale of how many children in Gaza have lost their families since the start of the war.
One last plug before I wrap up: registration for my online cultural criticism class for Blue Stoop closes tomorrow, 3/18, at 11:59 PM ET. Join us!