THE BOOK OF SARAHS covers a lot of ground: race and family, adoption, “multiracial identity”—specifically African American and Jewish identity—and sexuality. And yet it’s not easily categorized as an ‘adoption book’ or as ‘biracial literature.’  It’s very literary, and not at all issue-oriented in the way an audience might expect. How do you hope readers approach this book?

I’ve heard feedback from some booksellers and people in the publishing industry that the book is “a lot for readers,” that it could be difficult to categorize, difficult to find a sales hook for. My first response is: ‘It’s hard to sell?  Imagine living all of that!’  But actually, being Black, Jewish, adopted, gay, and a few other things, and growing up with WASPS, is quite livable, containable. I like to think of SARAHS as a book that explores a larger predicament that most people struggle with: What happens when the things you want most for yourself are unattainable, or attainable, but so uncomfortably imperfect, that you are forced to confront yourself—after great investment and passion—in the terrible tug of the futility and necessity of going after them?  What do you make of life after that encounter with yourself?

I also like to think about the book as an exploration of lying—of the lies we often “tell on ourselves.” I am talking about a very universal struggle, told through the lens of what some would characterize as the “extreme”—a lying, transracially adopted post-1960s Black and Jewish and woman, growing up in the foreclosures of liberal politics in America. This question of lying and the emotional burden of secrecy comes up again and again for all of the characters in the book, most of whom are white, middleclass Americans. However unconsciously, these people see themselves benignly “protecting” their livelihoods, their desires, their mental health, their families, and supposed larger social and political ideals with these lies. I wanted to look with humor and exactingness and some kindness at myself—a person who practiced lying—and my family and the larger context of liberalism and the social welfare system.

At the same time, I have tried to write about the inside of transracial adoption, and my own post-1960s transracially adopted “mulatta” life. There are less than a few thousand Black and “bi-racial” children who were adopted into white homes in the 1960s and 1970s. I didn’t know them, and I didn’t really know any other Black person until I was a teenager. As a child, I spent a lot of time in the realm of imagination—imagining, re-imagining, re-making myself a thousand times into the Black woman I thought I would be if I had grown up with my biological family, bucking my parents’ largely isolated life of wilderness-seeking. I connected first to Black people through the literary heritage my parent’s handed me. But in some respects, I felt further isolated within that reading world. There were no transracial adoptees in the books I read, and the “mulatta” stories were all predictions of lives leading to suicide or some other form of erasure. So, by the time writing became a possibility for me, I knew I wanted to insert my own experience into the literary imagination. I wanted to write about the tragic, while reaching for the comic, the unsentimental, the less precious aspects of “trans-bi” lives.

What kinds of early responses have you received from audiences and readers?

It’s funny. A lot of people get hung up on the Sarahs—the fact that my birthmother had three daughters, each named “Sarah,” two of whom she relinquished, one which she hid. It’s certainly startling, but the book is not intent on this as spectacle. It is most interesting to me as a way to examine my larger fascinations with foreclosed desire and lying and imagination.

The first question I inevitably get is, How did your adoptive parents feel about you looking for your birth parents, and how do they feel about this book.All adoptive parents live in some way with the specter of their children’s “real family” (that is a term people actually often use when they reach for language about adoption). They have to grapple on some level with their children’s possible need to search for their biological families—even if they also exist in the comfort that, for most adoptees, the law holds off the likelihood of reunion. When I searched for my birth family, I was well into my twenties, so there was no real threat to them as parents—that status was certain. And I hadn’t lived in my parents’ house for more than a summer holiday after I left for boarding school at age fifteen. I had been raised under a strong family coda, a high value of independence and of not meddling in each other’s desires. So I was free, in a sense, and yet terribly alone. My mother was most concerned that I might be emotionally damaged by the search. But we can both see now that it was ultimately therapeutic, despite its heartbreaks. But I am very interested in the question. I think it reveals a lot about the idea—a sometimes very subtle one—that adoption is a service to children, that adoptees owe something particular to the people who raise us.

You’re a literary writer—you have spoken of first approaching the experience of transracial adoption through fiction, of even writing a first draft of a novel. Why did you turn to memoir?

I did start to write SARAHS as fiction. At that time, I was just beginning to think consciously about searching for my biological family. Or rather, I was in the very early stages of searching, when I had only very cursory—“non-identifying,” in social services parlance—information about my birth history. These kinds of abstracted details, and the sense of impossibility of breaking through the legal barriers that hold off the right to access to one’s birth history, kept me in this realm of frustrated direction. There was no “Sarah” in my book then. I wanted to write about a girl who was some kind of unspecified ‘Black and white” integrating an elite boarding school. As my search progressed, the unfolding narrative of my family history eclipsed my imagination. I was writing a novel about this girl and her lying ways, and confronting my own uncomfortable truths, which were painfully destroying some long-nurtured fantasies. There’s a quote I love from Philip Gourevitch, a writer I admire: “This is what fascinates me most in existence: the particular necessity of imagining what is in fact real.” He’s writing about Rwanda and genocide. I am using the idea, perhaps inappropriately, in the context of my narrow struggles, but it feels like an observation that means everything to my own history. I soon put aside the novel, and tried to deal with the immediate, sometimes violent-feeling disruption, or untwining of my reality. And I began to feel committed to writing transracial adoption into the literary imagination.

So, what is next? Are you working on anything new?

I am working on a novel about the indigo trade in West Africa—about an African American woman who goes to Ghana in the 1970s to sell buttons, and how she becomes entangled in the community of women who work and trade indigo. I have spent most of the past three years between New York and Ghana, first with the support of a Fulbright grant. In a funny way, SARAHS, became my portal to this project. The project came to me in the middle of writing this memoir. In the memoir, my concerns with family, history, exile, and the idea of re-making oneself, got spun into a fascination with cloth—material culture—and with the experience of immigration/expatriation, and this specter of fantasy. So, that is the next step. Back to fiction.