Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance

“Motherhood has been one way to change the narrative of the disposability of Black life,” writes Royster (Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions) in her affecting memoir. Royster, a Chicago-born queer African American woman, met her partner at the age of 32; after 13 years together, they adopted a Black child because they both were “aware of the ways that Black children had been left behind in this country.” In 2012, after passing screenings, applications, and home checks, the couple brought their daughter, Cece, home. Royster details the anxiety she felt as a Black woman raising a Black girl in what she viewed as a white supremacist society (“How can we give Cece a story about herself that counters these deeply held prejudices?”) and how parenthood helped her consider her own mother in a new light (“I’ve faced the fact that there are key parts of my mother that I didn’t know”). She also discusses the Black Lives Matter movement and her decision to not march with protestors in the summer of 2016 because she feared dying and “not being there for Cece.” Insightful and reflective, this is a moving tribute to the power of chosen family. Agent: Claire Anderson-Wheeler, RHA Literary. (Feb.)