My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past

Journalist Clark-Flory (Want Me) tracks down her long-lost half-sister in this plaintive memoir. In 1965 Indiana, Clark-Flory’s future mother, Deb, was an 18-year-old white woman who became pregnant by a Nigerian student. Deb’s father sent her to a home for unwed mothers, where she gave her daughter up for adoption. More than five decades later, Clark-Flory, who was raised as an only child, located her half-sister, Kathy, by then a flourishing grandmother, and the two quickly bonded. That story frames Clark-Flory’s explorations of the shame that once surrounded out-of-wedlock pregnancies, especially those resulting from interracial relationships; her loving but sometimes fraught relationship with Deb; her own conflicted quest for sexual autonomy; and her reflections on being a wife and mother. Clark-Flory writes movingly of the predicament of young women pressured into forfeiting their children, and of Deb’s lingering anguish (“ ‘I think about her every day of my life,’ she said in a gush of a whisper that sounded like air being let out of a tire”). Some of the author’s passionate social commentary, including her suggestion that “the punishment of sex workers was essential to getting women to accept unpaid labor in the family home,” is less convincing. Still, it’s a poignant family saga. Agent: Jamie Carr, Book Group. (May)