The Book of Sarahs
A Family in Parts
By Catherine McKinley

Catherine McKinley was one of only a few thousand African American and biracial children adopted by white couples in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Growing up in a small, predominantly white New England town, Catherine was plagued by a longing for a more diverse community and a hunger to live beyond her parent’s isolated life of wilderness seeking. She began a search for her biological family as a young adult, but nothing could have prepared her for the bureaucratic roadblocks that would stand in the way of her efforts—much less the extremely complicated ancestral tapestry she would unearth, with two half-sisters who both share her given name, “Sarah,” fixed at the center.

“This is a moving and most intelligent account of what it feels like to be locked up inside one of the more complicated identity crises of our time. Absorbing from beginning to end.”
—Vivian Gornick

Many less determined people would have buckled under the pressures McKinley had to bear growing up: she was adopted, biracial, and gay. But her unique status only fueled McKinley’s desire to discover the truth about who she was and where she came from. In an era shaped by the rhetoric of Black Power and Black Pride, McKinley’s coming of age demanded her own detailed investigation into her birth history, a search complicated by the terms of a closed adoption that denied her all knowledge of the circumstances of her birth. After a five-year period marked by dead ends and disappointments, she found her birth mother (who was not black at all, but Jewish) and a biracial half-sister named Sarah -- the same name originally given to her. When she eventually tracked down her birth father and met several of his eleven other children, she began to see the whole mosaic of her parentage—African American, WASP, Jewish, Native American—and was confronted with a final revelation that threatened to destabilize all she had uncovered.

“By turns funny and sad, sharp-witted, and never sentimental, Catherine McKinley’s account of her search for her ‘true’ beginnings illuminates both the impossibility and the necessity of her task. Her gift to us as readers is not the revelation of the ultimate answer, but the rich, spiraling complexity of the question: it takes a writer this good to ask, and ask again, so well.”
—Stacey D’Erasmo, author of Tea

At the center of the narrative is McKinley’s angry passion for her two mothers and her quest for self-acceptance in a world in which she seems to herself to be always outside the bounds of social legitimacy—as an adopted child, as a “mulatta,” and as a lesbian. In telling of her struggles both to fit into and to defy social conventions, McKinley challenges us to rethink our own preconceptions about race, identity, kinship, loyalty, and love.

The Book of Sarahs : A Family in Parts, is more than just an ‘adoption story’ or ‘race story;’ it is a suspenseful, passionate, sometimes riotously funny, at times painful, exploration of personal identity that explodes ideas of race, and calls into question our most fundamental notions of kinship, loyalty, sexuality, love, and what it means to be American.