Describing her childhood as the youngest of seven children growing up without schooling in the shadow of Buck Peak, Idaho, Tara Westover says, “It all seemed very normal to me.”

Speaking by phone from her home in Cambridge, England, Westover, 31, describes her life’s improbable trajectory that led to her startling memoir, Educated. It was so unusual, in fact, that a bidding war erupted over the sale of her book, which is now being published in more than 20 countries and has inspired comparisons to Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle and Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club.

When her survivalist father recounted the story of the 11-day siege of Randy Weaver in the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff, its vivid details became young Westover’s strongest memory. It was as though the Feds had invaded her own house with deadly gunfire. Striving to become fully independent and off the grid, the Westovers stockpiled food, gasoline, guns and a bullet-making machine in preparation for the End of Days.

“I was kind of looking forward to it in a lot of ways,” she recalls. “We were totally prepared. It was going to be a reversal of fortunes. My family had always been poor and looked down upon. Suddenly we were going to be royalty because we were going to have food and gasoline―all the things that people needed.”

The younger children in Westover’s family didn’t have birth certificates or exact birthdates. She wasn’t allowed to go to school, and there was little homeschooling. “By the time I was 10, the only subject I had studied systematically was Morse code, because Dad insisted that I learn it,” she writes. Doctors and hospitals were forbidden as well; the family relied on her mother’s herbs and essential oils, even after car accidents, concussions and severe burns. An older brother taught Westover to read, using Little Bear Goes to the Moon as her primer. A few books lay around the house, but lessons and tests were nonexistent.

She grew up studying the Book of Mormon, the Bible and essays by 19th-century Mormon prophets. Westover emphasizes that her story is not about Mormonism. She believes that mental illness, possibly bipolar disorder, led to her father’s extremism.

“There is a caricature of Mormonism that people have,” she explains. “I don’t want to contribute to that. These aren’t Mormon attributes. Mormons send their kids to school.”

Nor does Westover want her father to come across as a caricature. “Sure, his views are interesting,” she notes. “What’s also interesting is the fact that he sincerely believes them and that he is trying to look after his kids.”

Educated is the remarkable story of Westover’s education. She taught herself math so she could take the ACT, and at age 17 she first set foot in a classroom after enrolling in Brigham Young University. Fellow students laughed at her for having never heard of the Holocaust. Despite failing her first exam and fearing she would flunk out, she graduated in 2008 and later earned a Ph.D. in history at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Despite the gaping holes in their early education, three of the seven Westover children ended up earning Ph.D.s. “We seriously overcompensated.”

In many ways, Westover says, she had a positive childhood. “I grew up on a beautiful mountain that was like an amazing cathedral. The scrap yard at times was kind of like an exotic playground. And those are real parts of my childhood.”

“It was going to be a reversal of fortunes. My family had always been poor and looked down upon. Suddenly we were going to be royalty.”

However, a giant cloud overshadowed everything. Her father’s actions often endangered his children, and her childhood was complicated by years of physical and emotional abuse by an older brother. Her brother and parents deny this assertion, which has resulted in her estrangement from them and certain siblings.

Westover says leaving home and becoming educated “made me see my brother’s violence for what it was. . . . Suddenly, I could not accept it. And so once I started writing, I realized it’s really not possible for me to tell the story of my education in any kind of meaningful way without telling the family story.”

At first, the ongoing estrangement posed a problem in searching for an ending to her story. Westover admits, “In the end, I decided that maybe not having a neat ending would be what this book was about.” Perhaps, she adds, “people would see bits of their messy lives in my messy life.”

Her unique history presents hurdles when it comes to how she relates to her family in the present. “Most of the time I am no longer angry with them,” she says, “and the reason is that I am no longer afraid of them. I am no longer under their power.”

Anger did, however, color her outlook for years. “I became someone who had no beautiful memories,” she recalls. Writing helped her reconcile the contradictory truths of her past. “I could keep all of them because they’re mine, and no one can take from me the good, but also no one can obscure for me the bad.”

To prepare to write a book-length narrative, Westover read widely. And then, someone mentioned something called the short story. “I’d never heard of that before.” After listening to favorite episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast 40 to 50 times, she modeled each chapter like a short story. The strategy makes her memoir particularly readable and compelling. “For me it was the greatest curriculum,” she says.

Westover concludes, “You only get the life that you get. I’m glad that I was pushed in that way because now I know what I’m able to do. . . . But I wouldn’t go back and go through that again. Not for anything.”

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Paul Stuart.

It takes a talented writer to seamlessly blend memoir, biography, literary criticism, psychology and sociology into a meaningful whole. Add in the writer’s own battle with alcoholism, and the accomplishment becomes even more impressive.

That’s what Leslie Jamison, author of the highly regarded 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams, has done in her deeply felt new book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath. In a recent telephone call to her home in Brooklyn, she was eager to discuss the legendary, often romanticized connection between addiction and creativity.

“I knew from the very beginning that I didn’t want to write a straight memoir,” she explains. “I wanted to write about recovery. . . . Part of what’s always felt so central to the experience of recovery to me is the idea of opening outward and connecting to the lives of other people and finding resonance. . . . The idea of putting my life into a much larger chorus is part of what recovery felt like.”

The genesis of The Recovering was in fragments Jamison wrote in 2010, the year her current sobriety began. She continued working on the book after garnering her Ph.D. in English Literature at Yale, after which she cultivated a flourishing writing career and gave birth to her first child. Her goal in the book, she says, is to present “a complicated excavation of the messy truth that I see of the tortured alcoholic or addict artist, both honoring the difficulty of the lives that produced that art and honoring the creative possibilities of the other side of addiction, of what sort of generative possibilities lie in recovery.”

In The Recovering, Jamison offers insight into the lives of a group of writers—some well known, others less so—and their struggles with addiction and recovery. In sympathetic profiles of authors like Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace and Denis Johnson, which are gracefully woven into her own narrative, Jamison provides “models who found sobriety and recovery incredibly generative.” Many of the creatives that Jamison profiles experienced more nuanced addiction narratives than the one in which, as she says, “sobriety swoops in and is a creative fairy godmother and gives you a new creative life.” In writing about the tragic career of poet John Berryman, whose agonizing and embarrassingly public battle with alcoholism ended with a leap from a Minneapolis bridge in 1972, she describes a man who wrestled with an unfinished novel about recovery while trying and failing to stay sober.

But as Jamison explains, in shaping the book from a journalist’s perspective, it was also important to avoid confining her attention only to creatives. In addition to deep archival research into the lives of her artist subjects, she spent more than a year interviewing former patients at a rehabilitation facility known as Seneca House, which was established in the early 1970s near the Potomac River in Maryland.

“I wanted there to be stories of recovery in the book that weren’t about famous people, people for whom recovery had been transformative,” she says. These revelatory accounts introduce ordinary people who “had turned both their addicted lives and their sober lives into stories that made sense to them.”

“The idea of putting my life into a much larger chorus is part of what recovery felt like.”

For all of The Recovering’s biographical depth and literary sophistication, Jamison’s vividly rendered account of her own addiction and recovery is exceptionally engaging. Without solipsism or self-pity, she spares few details of her behavior, which features staggering quantities of alcohol, frequent blackouts and dangerous misadventures in places as far-flung as Nicaragua. Through each episode, the memoir has the immersive feel of compelling fiction.

The irresistible quality of that candor stems in part from what Jamison admits is nostalgia for “those early days of falling in love with the drinking, when intoxication still felt intoxicating.” That attraction emerged despite the physical and emotional ravages of her drinking days and all their “demoralizing or shameful or brutal or secretive” moments. She spares little mercy for herself in describing her disastrous relapse, an abortion and persistent conflict in the life she shared with her poet boyfriend, Dave, as sober a counterpart to Jamison as one could imagine. In telling her own story so unsparingly, Jamison hopes to “humanize the process that’s at the core of addiction,” one that can “look so inscrutable and deeply frustrating from the outside, and show what it looks like to crave something that’s destroying you.”

Also central to Jamison’s recovery story was Alcoholics Anonymous. In one of the book’s lighter scenes, she recalls the jarring moment when a meeting participant bellowed, “This is boring!” as she shared the tale of her alcoholism for the first time. That incident and others reveal the theme of storytelling at the heart the book: “I think it’s hard to stay mired in self-pity or obsessive attention to your own life when you’re just literally sitting in a room listening to other people talk about what they’re going through.”

It’s in that spirit of shared storytelling that Jamison prepares to embark on a 14-city, coast-to-coast book tour this spring. Among other things, she’s hopeful that The Recovering can be part of the urgently needed conversation about the problem of opioid addiction in the United States. “People are hungry for ways of talking about the addiction crisis that aren’t just policy talk, that are story-based,” she says. “There’s something about personal narrative that gives us a way into those questions.”

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo credit Beowulf Sheehan.

In her memoir Old in Art School, Nell Painter surprises everyone by returning to college in her 60s to earn degrees in one of her passions: painting.

How did you make your decision to leave a chaired professorship at Princeton to go to art school?
My decision to retire from Princeton a little early came in several steps, beginning with my mother’s turn to book writing when she retired back in the 1980s. I was always close to my mother, close to both my parents, actually, feeling my family as a bulwark against a basically hostile—well, if not hostile, at least not trustworthy—society. It took her 10 years to write and publish her first book and 10 years for the second. She was just that disciplined over the long haul, with discipline and persistence her gifts to me. My mother showed me you could change vocations, even though the payoff might not come immediately. The point was to do what you wanted to do. Looking at her, I figured, hell, I could do that, too. It just so happened that what I left was a chaired professorship at Princeton.

My friends were amazed, even dazzled by the possibility of walking away. Looking back, I realize I didn’t see things this way at the time: It might have seemed to some of them that an Ivy League chaired professorship was life’s apogee, as though imagination stretched that far and no farther. But I didn’t identify myself that closely with my job. I heard their curiosity, as they wondered what it would be like to start something entirely new. They asked me to send back a report. Which I am now doing—in utter candor.

Your father taught you to draw, and your mother taught you the art of reinvention by starting over at age 65 and becoming an author. Your mother died during your art school years, leaving your father deeply saddened before his death. You write, "My early years as a painter . . . felt as much about family and loss as about art making." How has the loss of your parents affected your art?
The short answer is I don’t know how my parents’ deaths affected my art, as I didn’t make art about their dying. In fact, I reproached myself for not being able to draw my mother as she lay dying, even though her dying made a riveting visual spectacle. I simply could not take what felt like a step away from her to turn her into art. Art-making did not come automatically to me then.

But as I ponder your question, I think the answer, maybe even the answers, lie first in my chapter “A Bad Decision” and in my inability to dedicate myself single-mindedly, whole-heartedly, full-timedly to making art. My decision to go to graduate school before completing four years of undergraduate art study was not the right thing to do. I should have stayed at Mason Gross for another year. But I felt time pressing down on me urgently as something in short supply. Only as I was writing my memoir did I relate that feeling of time’s limitation to my mother’s impending death and my attachment to her. My time felt like her time.

Throughout the whole of my five years of art school, my parents stayed on my mind. They were hardly ever off my mind or out of my worries. There were daily phone calls and frequent transcontinental trips. Sometimes I could combine art with parental care, as in “Bedside Collages.” But art-time always felt distracted, though graduate school normally offers undistracted time to work flat out and full time, to experiment in depth and find the way to make art your very own way. I felt that sometimes and cherished the sensation. But often as not, my attention was divided. I still miss the opportunity to make art intensely over a relatively long period of time. What a gift that would be!

As for my parents, rather than the import of their loss, I appreciate the gifts they gave me during their lives. They assured me I was a wonderful person who could do whatever I wanted, the basis for the ego strength to take chances. They were hardly wealthy people, but, something of supreme importance, they made sure I never had to make decisions based on fear of running out of money. People don’t talk about that very much, but financial stability is crucially important when you’re making decisions about what you can or can’t do, especially regarding something as expensive and unlikely to pay off as art school. If you’re African-American, freedom from money worries is even less to be taken for granted.

Bette Davis once said that old age is no place for sissies. And neither is art school, it seems, especially when your age made you feel like “a creature from another planet.” Of course, things weren’t helped when your teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) declared that you would never be an artist. Did you ever feel you had made a mistake leaving such a successful career to go to art school?
Oh, boy, did I ever question my sanity for leaving the life I knew how to live for one I felt lost in! The hard part about art for me—one of the hard parts—was my sense of not knowing what was good and not good. Not knowing why my art was not good. One great thing about scholarship is the existence of established criteria of judgment. People don’t always respect those criteria, and there’s plenty of room for old-boy networks and the workings of privilege. Still, the rules of the game are pretty apparent. Not so with art.

I still sometimes feel like the worst painter in the world, but I don’t care anymore. There are awful painters who have their followings; there are more excellent painters in the world than can receive their due.

I love your response to that teacher: “Henry, that’s bullshit.” Although at first you enjoyed a sense of contentment and euphoria at RISD, you ultimately concluded, “this was not my place, and these were not my people.” Looking back, would you do things differently?
As for “not my place, not my people,” the fundamental problems were my age and myself, neither of which I could change. The thing I would do differently would be staying another year at Mason Gross. But that would have just made me a year older, and I’d still be myself: black, academic, female. A fundamental matter was black-in-America. Yes, yes, yes, I know nonblack people often find it difficult to feel at home or find their own people. Missing home may be a basic American or basic human condition. But on top of basic American, you have to add being black in America. Even if you don’t run into discrimination, there are the everyday interactions with nonblack Americans that are exhausting, that remind you that you seem not to belong. This is not anything I can change. And that’s not to add in the matter of working across generations.

Your professors were astounded by the progress you made during the summer between your first and second year of grad school. Did you surprise yourself as well?
During that summer, my growth pleased me enormously. I suppose I took for granted that the work I was enjoying would be good work. But I can’t say I was surprised. My progress didn’t surprise me, but I was amazed by my teachers’ surprise at the beginning of the second fall semester. I have never gotten over how little some people can expect of me.

You note that “the Art World is racist as hell and unashamed of it.” Are things improving?
Everybody always wants to think things are “improving,” so I’ll say they are: Yes. Things are improving. The work of women artists, old women artists, black artists, black women artists, old black women artists is being seen as never before. But basically, as my more experienced art mentors told me, the Art World is racist as hell and unashamed of it. The Art World is part of the U.S., which, if you read the papers you know, is still racist as hell. The improvement is that some Americans are starting to see that and to take steps to address longstanding discriminatory practices. There’s still a long way to go before I will say there’s been fundamental improvement.

When it came time to write your thesis, your first draft was full of anger about injustices in the art world. You, an award-winning historian and author, ended up going to the RISD writing center for help purging that anger. How did that go? Was the person helping you intimidated?
As you can see from my answer to the previous question, my “anger” hasn’t been purged. But I had the sense to see my shortcoming as the author of an MFA thesis and to get the instruction I needed. I don’t think Teacher Jen in the writing center was intimidated. She had seen my problem before and told me of other instances in which MFA students had had to find means of tamping down indignation and to focus on the visual aspects of their work within the context of art.

You’ve written numerous books, but none so personal as Old in Art School. How tough was that?
Writing personally was hard as hell and took several years. I had to dig out experiences and sensations that lay under my consciousness’s surface, and I had to see other people around me, fellow students especially, but also teachers, in situations where I was intensely self-centered. As I wrote through my sufferings, I came to see that maybe they weren’t as awful as I had made them out to be. I still say that earning a Ph.D. in history at Harvard was a piece of cake compared to earning an MFA at RISD. But now I’m wondering if the comparison is shaped by the decades separating the two experiences. Maybe in 33 years, RISD will seem like a piece of cake compared to—what, assisted living?

Near the end of your book you write, “Like artists the world over, my bayoneted, hand-to-hand struggle between insecurity and self-confidence never ends.” Did you have to endure such a constant battle with insecurity as a historian? Are you keeping your artistic struggle in check?
I never had to wage such an anti-insecurity battle as a historian because I loved research and writing, and I knew what I needed to do to succeed. I did it. I hit all the marks (publication, promotion, tenure, fellowships) and received sufficient honors.

I love making art—the process, I mean. And I have enough of a sense of what is my own art to feel good about that. At the same time, I know I’m the world’s uncoolest artist, and I’m OK with that. If what I make is not good enough, that’s its nature. That’s what I make and who I am: the world’s uncoolest artist.

You’ve incorporated both history and text (including pages from your own books) into your artwork, bringing your career into a glorious, unified circle. Would you say that you've found your voice? How would you summarize your artistic style and goals?
Thanks for “a glorious, unified circle,” which sounds really good! I hadn’t thought of my work in so assured a way. I saw more a long work-in-progress, a documentation of how one person’s work changes and grows over time as she starts over. I wanted to show some dumb early stuff and some pieces growing out of one another as closer and farther relations. I do feel I’ve found my manual + digital process, which you may call a “voice” or “style,” often related to history and sometimes embracing text. That sense of finding myself visually occurred with “Art History by Nell Painter,” which is why I pretty much end there. I don’t know that I have a “goal,” because I don’t feel myself going anywhere with an end or objective other than making art. Making the art that gratifies and interests me. Freedom attracted me to art making. Still does.

What are you working on now?
I just made four digital collages for the Three Hole Press publication of Daaimah Mubashshir’s plays, The Immeasurable Want of Light. Otherwise, tasks related to the publication and promotion of Old in Art School have taken up virtually all my time this year and precluded immersion on art. I have started something I call “Book Book” that will embody the experience of talking about my memoir over this year. It begins with two photos of me reading my Blackstone audiobook in a tiny studio on 9th Avenue in New York City last month.

I think about two or three artists’ books that will take time to envision and to make, as I have only fragments in mind right now. I will need to carve out time to work on them concentratedly.

How do you feel when you’re in that artistic “zone”?
I feel like I will never stop. Every image demands elaboration—into another shape or another color or another piece. This concentration, this play, makes me feel contented, even when I see I need more time to get to another place or a different image. When I have to stop, I’m usually among images I couldn’t have imagined when I started.

What advice do you have for other “old” people who might be contemplating reinventing themselves?
Advice?! As I say at the end of Old in Art School, people don’t usually want advice; they want to be listened to. So I’d say find someone who will listen to you and who knows something about what you’re thinking about doing. I’d say try it out for a little while. Take a class at your local community college. But my biggest, most important piece of advice, especially for old black women, for black women, for old women, for all women, for black people, for people young and old, for nonblack people is: Don’t see yourself through other people’s eyes.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Old in Art School.

A portion of this article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by John Emerson.

Camas Davis cares deeply about the integrity of animals’ lives. She is also a butcher. In her beautifully written memoir, Killing It, Davis makes it clear that these two aspects of her life can peacefully coexist. Davis’ lucid, striking prose recounts a life-altering journey that began when, directionless and brokenhearted, she booked a flight to France with the last of her funds to spend seven weeks learning how to be a butcher in Gascony.

I met up with Davis at an airy coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, where she now runs the Portland Meat Collective, a school where Davis and various chefs and butchers teach classes about responsible meat consumption. Using animals sourced from local and trustworthy farmers dedicated to raising animals humanely, the collective instructs the curious on slaughter, butchery and cooking practices.

But the road to the Portland Meat Collective was a crooked one for Davis. Growing up in rural Oregon, Davis regularly went hunting and fishing with her father and grandfather, both avid outdoorsmen. “I wasn’t squeamish about dead fish or guts or plucking feathers from ducks,” she says. “It was just a part of how I thought about the world.” In her teens, however, the hunting and fishing fell by the wayside, and she eventually became a magazine editor and entered a long-term relationship with the man she thought she would marry.

“In my late 20s, early 30s, I was very orthodox. I worked for magazines, that was what I did, that was my career. I was going to do it forever.” And then it all fell apart. After leaving her relationship, she lost her job as a magazine editor in Portland. Davis was despondent, but she also realized that she was now free to do whatever she wanted, and what she truly longed for was authenticity—not to just write about the genuine article, but to live it.

It was then that she decided to return to her childhood connection to land, life and death by exploring butchery. “I’ve sort of been fascinated with it for years, as a food writer,” she says. “I was always very excited to work on stories about butchers or about chefs who did butchery, or even just a cut of meat. For some reason, that subject matter felt like it had more of a story than a tomato—which is not true. A tomato has as much of an interesting story as anything else. But I guess the story of the tomato is much more accessible, and I’m always the person that’s like, ‘I want the inaccessible story.’”

Staying with Kate Hill—an American living in France who hosts travelers on gastronomic journeys—on her compound in Gascony, Davis ventured out to find the inaccessible. She went to work for the Chapolard family on their farm, and it was with them that she found something she felt was truly authentic. The Chapolards raise their own pigs on grain they grow themselves, and they own a nearby co-op slaughterhouse. The family gathers together to butcher the animals, and they turn every part of the pigs into hams, loins and the more obscure delicacies that Americans balk at: head cheese, blood sausage, trotters. They then sell the products at market. Davis was enamored with their practices, but she doesn’t romanticize it.

“I think, generally, we’re weirdly afraid of food.”

“There’s so much about the disappearance of the agrarian way in modern times. It’s now becoming this myth, this caricature,” she says. “There’s definitely this sort of nostalgic ideal of what a butcher is.” Davis makes it clear that there’s not much about butchery that is charming. “I really struggle with that in the work that I do. I never want to give the impression that any of this is easy—that it’s easy to kill an animal, or that it’s easy to raise good meat, or that it’s easy to sell the whole animal.” But Davis is committed to bringing meat to the table that comes from animals that lived good lives and died as humanely as possible. It’s a serious matter, and Davis is a serious, deeply curious woman who is driven to poke at what others find unappealing.

Like pig brains, for example. In Killing It, Davis reflects upon the brain from a pig’s skull that she’s just cleaved open: “So much of what we do is in the service of keeping opposing ideas at bay inside ourselves. Isn’t this what we’re doing when we eat meat without taking part in the process that brings it to our tables, without ever being required to stare back at the animal that made that meat possible?”

To take part in this process is to grapple with a uniquely American wariness of food, in particular raw meat. “I think, generally, we’re weirdly afraid of food [in America]. We’re afraid of what it will do to us, we’re afraid of how to use it in the kitchen, we’re afraid of where it comes from. And yet, we don’t really do anything about that fear.”

Davis doesn’t shy away from that fear; she seeks it out and confronts it. She begins her memoir by recounting a pig slaughter, watching the life drain out of a 700-pound sow. “There’s a lot of assumptions we make about what that moment [of death] is like,” Davis explains, “and some of those assumptions are correct. It can be gruesome. It can be like horribly haphazard. It can be mechanized and scary. But it doesn’t have to be.”

Davis surmises that a large part of Americans’ unease toward meat is ultimately wrapped up in the big fear: death. Davis wants to inspect that fear, handle it and understand the whole bloody mess of it. “Everything I’m writing about in this book about [the] death of animals for food is really just a larger metaphor for how we think about death in general, and the ways in which we hide all of that.”

When asked about her favorite cut of meat, Davis’ answer comes as no surprise. “I tend to like the cuts that no one else likes. . . . They tend to be cuts that you have to cook for a long time or smoke or grill on indirect heat. The complex cuts.” In that same spirit, Killing It puts uncomfortable, complex truths out on the table, no matter what they are, and digs in.

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Cheryl Juetten.

In her memoir, All You Can Ever Know, Nicole Chung, who was adopted as a baby by a couple in Oregon, explores how the truths that were revealed upon finding her birth parents changed her life. Here Chung discusses growing up Asian-American in a white family, her writing and editing career and more. 

What prompted you to turn your experience into a book, and why at this particular point in your life?
I’ve tried to answer people’s questions about adoption my whole life. My thoughts about it—and of course, the answers to which I’ve had access—have undergone some real change over the years. I’d tried to tell pieces of the story in essays, and it finally just became clear that only a book-length project was going to provide the space I needed to explore the whole story with all its nuances.

I really wanted to write this for families like mine and for younger readers who don’t see themselves in the books they adore. Ideally, reading this story will also encourage some people to reconsider issues around transracial adoption and identity and multiracial families and people who exist between cultures. I fervently hope this book helps make room for more adopted people to tell our stories, as opposed to others telling them for us.

As for why I wrote it now, I don’t believe I’d have been ready to write this 10 years ago, right after I searched for my birth family. I was writing about it at the time, of course, but mostly in journals and letters; it would be five years before I published anything at all about it. I could perhaps have written this book three or four years ago, when I first had the idea, but you know, it takes a while to find an agent and write a proposal and convince someone to let you write the book! And I’m glad it happened now. It’s probably a better book because I had a lot of time to think about it, and to fully consider and process what happened during my first pregnancy and my search, and see how the choices we all made at the time continued to play out in our lives.

As a child, you felt out of place in a predominantly white town, and you mention that you found solace in writing your own Asian-American characters. You are now frequently able to interview and write about people of color. Has being able to address race helped you develop as a writer?
Almost everything I write about has helped me develop as a writer! I do love talking with interesting people, learning more about their art and their work and why they do what they do. I love to interview people, and I love research; writing about other subjects and figuring out which questions to ask have certainly helped me grow as a writer. I hope I get to do a lot more of that in the future.

While All You Can Ever Know is respectful and considerate of all your family, uncovering the story of your adoption was clearly not an emotionally easy task. How has your family walked with you through the publishing process?
So much of the story belongs to my sister Cindy as well, so she was the first person I shared a draft with. I asked her to tell me if she wanted me to change or take anything out, but she didn’t, though she did help me by answering my annoying questions and correcting a few tiny things. She and my brother-in-law, Rick, are proud of the book, and have been so supportive throughout this process. I’ve also shared the book with my birth father, who is working his way through it more slowly: He’s fluent in English, but Korean is his first language, and I don’t think he reads a ton of memoirs in English. He encouraged me to write whatever I needed to write and said I could check facts with him and Cindy, but he didn’t feel it was his place to tell me what to say about my adoption.

My adoptive parents have been very supportive, and also just very interested in the whole publishing experience and what it involves. I sent them a draft right after I sent it to Cindy. My mother has read the book, and she really likes it. As I wrote about here, my adoptive father suddenly passed away while I was working on the book; he only got through about half of it before he died.

Do you feel that becoming a mother yourself gave you any greater understanding of your family, both adoptive and biological?
Becoming a mother certainly changed my understanding of myself, and encouraged me to reconsider what I thought I knew about my families—my family of origin, the one I grew up in and the one I was starting with my husband. I was thinking a lot about the kind of parent I wanted to be, the things I wanted my own children to have and to know. Before, I’d only been able to consider that in the most hypothetical sense!

Becoming a parent makes you question so much about yourself, I think, and that’s true whether or not you’re adopted. But in my case, because I am adopted, expecting a child of my own pushed me into asking questions about my history and my families that I hadn’t been 100 percent ready to ask before.

Your work at Catapult magazine helps elevate a variety of voices, and Catapult’s publishing arm released All You Can Ever Know. Will you share your perspective on the value of these sorts of independent outlets?
I am far from an expert in traditional publishing, as my background is really in the digital space—but I really do appreciate how indie publishers can and will take risks, often inspired ones, for books and authors they believe in. Many of them are starting with a diverse list of beautiful writers and making that their foundation. They are centering these writers and throwing everything they’ve got behind them. I don’t think Catapult ever saw my book as a risk, exactly—at least, no more so than any other book. They’ve told me all along it’s great, which I appreciate deeply because I am, like many writers, insecure about my work. I feel very lucky that they bought it before I went to work for the magazine, actually, because if I’d already been an employee I don’t think I’d have even sent it to Julie Buntin (my editor there).

We have so very few memoirs by adopted writers writing about adoption—the cultural narrative around it has really been dominated by nonadoptees—and so few by Asian-American women. And it’s really not always easy to convince someone to let you be one of the few or one of the first. But for Catapult, I think all of that was actually a selling point. Julie was the perfect editor for this book, and I’ve had the kind of institutional support many debut writers can only dream of.

As for my editorial work at the magazine, it’s a constant thrill to get to publish so many wonderful writers every single day. Before Catapult, I was at the Toast, and as a freelancer I’ve also had the privilege of writing for many outlets and publications, many of them independent. We publish a wide range of voices, some more established than others, but to be honest my favorite thing is working with emerging writers—being someone’s first byline.

How did your work at Catapult and other outlets, where you focus on shorter pieces, inform the process of writing your memoir?
Writing a lot makes you a better writer! I’ve been lucky to be edited often, and well, and that has taught me a great deal. Editing other writers on the daily has also made me a better writer—I can look at a piece of work (even my own) and identify things that are working and things that aren’t. I also know that even if I write a draft that isn’t super, I can tear it apart later and maybe turn it into something I don’t hate.

I was a little nervous about writing an entire book when my longest published essay was around, I don’t know, 4,000 words? And I knew I was writing a memoir with one continuous narrative arc, as opposed to a collection of essays. As an essayist and editor, though, I possess a bottomless well of faith in the writing/editorial process. And I trusted my editor entirely. That is probably what got me through.

You also write quite a bit about books, so I’ve got to ask: What are you reading?
I just finished The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, and I’m currently in the middle of way too many books, as usual: Sanpaku by Kate Gavino, The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya (translated by Asa Yoneda), A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton and The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo.

While this book is deeply personal, you also write about a range of other topics (some family-oriented, others not). What’s next on your radar?
I’m working on a few different projects, nothing I’m quite ready to go into detail about, but I hope to talk and collaborate with more great people and write more books. I’ve started a novel. I imagine I’ll keep doing my day job, because I really enjoy it! I would particularly like to help more of our magazine contributors think about and develop book-length projects if that is their goal. I also want to teach more, and I’ll keep freelancing whenever I get the chance.

In the more immediate short-term, when I get through book tour, I will probably be looking into the grief counseling I have not had any time or space for this year. And—it’s probably not going to happen!—but I think a month-long vacation would be lovely.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of All You Can Ever Know.

Author photo by Erica B. Tappis

Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman’s Sounds Like Titanic is so fabulously surreal, I checked twice to be certain it was indeed a memoir and not a work of fiction. In her debut, Hindman recounts the nearly four years she spent as a violinist in an ensemble led by an eccentric man whom she refers to only as the Composer. Hindman and the other musicians perform shows across America in performance halls, malls and at fairs, but they’re part of a bizarre deception: The musicians are barely making sounds with their instruments. The music the audience hears is coming from a hidden CD player hooked up to the speakers. 

“From the very beginning of working with that group, I knew that there was a story,” Hindman says in a call to her home in Kentucky, where she teaches creative writing at Northern Kentucky University.

Playing the violin professionally had been Hindman’s dream since she was a child growing up in a small West Virginia town, as her devotion to the instrument earned her peers’ awe and adults’ respect. Hindman recalls, “There was something going on in the way people would look at me when I played the violin, that I could tell even as a kid, it made them think of me as more serious.” Being a classical musician also allowed her to escape the suffocating confines of gender norms—she was a talented violinist, not a talented girl.

Determined to leave her Appalachian upbringing behind, she applied to and was accepted at Columbia. But at Columbia, she realized that while she was talented and hardworking, she was far from a spectacular violinist. Tuition was also exorbitant, and when she saw a job listing for a violinist with a famous composer and his Billboard-topping ensemble, she mustered up her last dregs of optimism and sent in an audition tape. 

She was stunned when she got the job. The Composer has sold millions of albums, and his uplifting, soaring music has scored numerous television specials. It also sounds just like the soundtrack for the 1997 film Titanic. “It’s as close as you can get to the Titanic soundtrack without being the Titanic soundtrack,” Hindman says. “Hours and hours and hours of instrumental music with a lot of penny whistle and violin and light piano playing.”

When she first began performing with the ensemble, the admiration on the faces of audience members listening to her “play” was like a drug. But during a seven-week cross-country tour with the ensemble in a decrepit RV, Hindman realized a few things about the Composer. His diet was seemingly composed entirely of apples and cereal. He was unable to remember Hindman’s name, and instead called her Melissa for the entire tour. He was unfamiliar with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and in 2004, he had no idea who John Kerry was. Before every concert, he told the ensemble that they must remember to grin throughout the entire performance because “some people out there have cancer.”

“When you look at him, he looks like a famous composer,” Hindman says. But as she stood on stage with him, faking a smile and pretending to play the violin, she began to lose touch with reality. She started having crippling panic attacks, sometimes multiple times within an hour. The violin no longer provided her with an escape. 

“I think that there was something that was just plain old stage fright about it, where you’re just up on the stage and all these people are  looking at you,” she says. “Because the music was prerecorded . . . all you’re doing is basically standing in front of people playing a role. You have a lot of time to think.” 

Working with the Composer was a grueling, difficult time for Hindman, when her understanding of who she was and what she wanted was turned on its head. But it also forced her to inspect some of her flawed beliefs about gender and femininity, the definition of success and happiness, and the debatable merits of working yourself to near-death. “I think part of it was just growing up and realizing that the pressures that I was putting on myself at that age were just completely unreasonable and dumb,” she says. “There’s all these other aspects of life that have nothing to do with winning trophies or being the best at anything but that are just as important. Certainly, writing the book itself helped me congeal all of this in my mind.”

It’s clear that Hindman feels conflicted about the Composer, although she is generously empathetic. “Probably the biggest surprise was how I started feeling a lot more like I had so much in common with the Composer. As I was reading and revising the book, I started to feel a more profound kinship with him in terms of, like, well, what do you do if you’re not born with genius? You have to work your way around that in some way.”

Surprisingly, Hindman’s bizarre, existentially traumatic stint as a pseudo-professional violinist hasn’t spoiled classical music for her. “I listen to violin music all the time. I don’t play so much anymore,” she says. Although her violin days are over, Hindman can be assured that she’s accomplished something incredible: She has written a memoir about identity and finding a sense of self that is funny, personal, empathetic and, amazingly, true.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Haben Girma was born deafblind in California, to refugee parents forced to flee war-torn Eritrea. While her mother and father struggled to cope as immigrants, Girma simply yearned to belong—“a deafblind girl in a sighted, hearing world.”

Today Girma speaks from a global stage, advocating for improved access to education and services for disabled people. We asked her some questions about her new memoir, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, and about making education accessible for all people.

As a child, you confronted a bull. As a teen, you helped build a schoolhouse in Mali. As an adult, you slid down an iceberg in Alaska. To what or whom do you attribute such fierceness when it comes to your risk-taking?
Seeing is knowing for most people. I can’t sit on the sidelines and watch the world. I could settle for not knowing, or I could choose to experience the world. My sense of curiosity urges me to approach a bull, sift sand for bricks, climb an iceberg and learn everything I can about our surprising world.

Your parents were refugees from the besieged country of Eritrea. You were born with disabilities that made you intensely aware of exclusion: Your diminishing hearing and vision often left you feeling isolated from your peers. How do you relate to your parents’ experience, and how has that helped your own advocacy work?
I grew up listening to the stories of my parents’ struggles during the war. They paved a path through injustice, finding their way through thousands of unknowns. Their stories inspired me to pave my own path as a deafblind woman in a sighted, hearing world.

“The biggest barrier [to inclusivity] is society’s underlying assumption that people with disabilities are incompetent and do not add value to society.”

You once saw your parents’ natural protective instincts as a hindrance to overcome. What advice would you give today, as an adult, to parents of a child who is disabled—and to the child?
Parents, please give your kids the freedom to explore their world, make mistakes and develop into confident adults. Whenever you feel yourself about to utter, “You can’t . . .” pause and give yourself time to research the question. Help your child find solutions.

Kids with disabilities, build friendships with other people with disabilities, including adults. You’ll learn new alternative techniques and advocacy strategies from each other.

Your sense of humor infuses your book. You relate how you learned in childhood that laughter inspires warmth and makes communication easier all around. Have you always had this lightness of heart, or is it something you’ve developed?
Many of my family members express love through joking and teasing. When I started joking back, their laughter delighted me. Since then I’ve actively worked on developing my comedic skills, and recently I’ve been taking improv workshops, too.

You employ a cane, a Seeing Eye dog and electronic technology as assistive tools. What are your hopes for the future of adaptive aids, and how can access to them be broadened?
Some of the most crucial assistive technologies, like Braille computers and power wheelchairs, are not affordable to the people who need them. I’m hoping that future innovations will bring down the cost of assistive tech.

At Harvard Law School, assistive technology and the school’s enlightened approach (providing interpreters, for example) helped you to succeed. Do you think it has become any easier for disabled students today? How can schools do more?
Overall, students with disabilities have greater access now than in the past. Many barriers still exist, though. Schools continue to buy inaccessible learning tools, and teachers continue discouraging disabled students who express interest in math and science. We need all schools to remove barriers so that disabled and nondisabled students can contribute their ideas and learn from each other.

When you are out with people, you ask them to describe in detail the environment you are in, as if, as one friend says, they are setting the scene for a book or movie. In doing that, they become more aware of their surroundings as well. Do you think this is one way to build community between people who are sighted and hearing and people who are disabled?
Disabilities invite people to become more aware of their surroundings. You might tap into senses you rarely pay attention to, like smell and touch. You may notice barriers in the environment, such as garbage cans blocking sidewalk access for wheelchair users. Spending time with someone who experiences a life different from your own will increase understanding and pave the way for meaningful relationships.

“Spending time with someone who experiences a life different from your own will increase understanding and pave the way for meaningful relationships.”

Your ambivalence about acquiring and training a Seeing Eye dog is likely something a sighted person would not consider. What advice would you give to blind or deafblind people when making that decision for themselves?
Blind people need to develop strong travel skills before training with a guide dog. Without travel skills, the blind person and dog will both end up lost. The dogs depend on their human partners to feed them, offer water and provide directions on how to get home. I love traveling with a guide dog and have encouraged many friends to apply to guide dog school. One must master cane travel first, though.

In your “Brief Guide to Increasing Access for People with Disabilities,” you offer clear advice about how not to marginalize disabled people and how to, instead, work together for creative solutions that can benefit the entire community. How do you think children can be sensitized and educated at an early age to be the empathetic, informed adults needed for such cooperation?
We can help children grow into empathetic adults by introducing them to diverse stories at an early age. We can also encourage kids to identify when someone might feel left out and teach them how to reach out and build friendships with kids who may feel marginalized.

In 2015, you met President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden at the White House, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). You were honored for your own work. What would you say to leaders today, to help ensure the ADA remains viable?
The promise of the ADA depends on enforcement. Leaders need to insist on the removal of barriers that have denied access for people with disabilities for far too long. In cases where stubborn institutions refuse to create inclusion, then leaders can employ the ADA to remove barriers through the legal system.

In your epilogue, you say that today your mission is to “help increase opportunities for people with disabilities through education-based advocacy.” As a public speaker on a global stage, what are you hoping for specifically as the results of your own advocacy?
Through my advocacy I hope to shift the dominant narrative from one where businesses think of disability entirely in terms of charity, if at all, to a world where businesses recognize that choosing inclusion drives growth and innovation.

What do you think are the biggest obstacles today to the inclusivity you seek for disabled people?
The biggest barrier is society’s underlying assumption that people with disabilities are incompetent and do not add value to society.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law.

Author photo credit: Sean Fenn

What happens when two adults and their two daughters ditch their suburban Washington, D.C., life and spend a year living in four spots around the world? Writer Dan Kois and his family spent 2017 in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica and Kansas. We had some questions about his entertaining account of this year, How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together.

Was it hard picking the four destinations of your journey? Did you seriously consider any other options?

We considered scores of other options! Just off the top of my head I remember Argentina, France, Scotland, Japan, Senegal, Tahiti, Iceland, Sweden, Italy, China, India and of course Canada (both Québec and British Columbia). It was extremely difficult! We spent a lot of time researching countries, talking to friends with connections to those countries and thinking about what would be best not only for our family but also for the book I hoped to write. We wanted to find places we actually wanted to go but that also had real, tangible differences from our East Coast suburban lives—places that had things to teach us.

You write that practically everyone asks, “Why Kansas?” Did you decide early on that one leg of your journey would be in the United States?

No, it was up in the air until the very end. But it did seem to me that I had to seriously consider the idea that it would be pretty facile to write a book about trying to look beyond our American parenting without acknowledging that there are plenty of American parents whose lives don’t resemble ours at all. In the end, I was convinced by our friend Catherine’s declaration that if we moved to Kansas, “we’d be so bored, but we’d be so happy.” I called her bluff and moved two blocks away from her.

Now that some time has passed, do you have a favorite moment from this grand adventure? Or a least favorite moment, for that matter?

I think the goodbye party our friends and neighbors threw in Island Bay, New Zealand, is right up there. It was kind of a perfect night that had the added joy of being so obviously the perfect final scene for that section of the book that I felt through the entire evening great personal and professional fulfillment.

The least favorite moment I wrote about was Lyra’s awful experience in her Dutch school, which was basically my fault. That sucked. The least favorite moment I didn’t write about was, after a 17-hour flight, having an armed guard at the Dubai airport pull me aside, open my gigantic suitcase, remove every single thing from it and finally pull from inside a shoe the weed grinder I’d bought in Wellington on Cuba Street (which I hadn’t even ground any weed in yet!!!!) and sternly tell me, “We don’t do this here.”

You and your wife did an enormous amount of planning before you left. What were the most unexpected difficulties you ran into? Did you have any truly unforeseen surprises?

It was so difficult working out schools for our kids! We knew we didn’t want to homeschool or send our kids to private schools. We wanted to experience the public schools in each country. In New Zealand, it required applying for a very specific kind of visa, for which my publisher had to write me a letter of recommendation promising I was not taking any New Zealand jobs while we lived there. In the Netherlands, I spoke to a solid half-dozen people up the bureaucratic chain until I was actually talking to, like, the deputy minister of education, who told me all about an exciting pilot program in Dutch/English bilingual schooling happening at a school in Delft, and then it turned out he was totally wrong and our kids ended up at a school where no one spoke English to them at all. I sure didn’t foresee that.

Also, there were no Airbnbs in Hays, Kansas.

Biking in the Netherlands seemed treacherous at first, but you and your family ended up loving it. Surprisingly, the Dutch don’t wear bike helmets. Are you still biking without a helmet back in the U.S.?

I sure am! I try to ride big, with the self-confidence of a tall, handsome Dutchman. I take up a lot of space on the road and ignore impatient drivers as they pile up behind me. Eventually, one of them will run me over, teaching me a valuable lesson about cultural differences.

Two of the biggest joys of your book are your humor and honesty. Did your family have any editing power over what you included? Your oldest daughter, after all, noted, “I do not entirely dislike my father’s portrayal of me but think that it’s inaccurate in some ways.”

Lyra, my eldest, did indeed insist upon reading the book and giving notes. I resisted this quite a bit and then, much to my surprise, took pretty much all her notes. My wife also read the book and offered many great suggestions but made only one heartfelt plea: “Please do not include your salary in this book.” So I didn’t.

Were you often taking notes? Did your family ever peer over your shoulder or deem anything strictly off limits?

My kids were really aware, throughout the trip, that reporting—the work of interviewing and note-taking—was happening, and that this was a book in the making. They made many recommendations about moments that should or should not go into the book, people I should talk to, stories I should tell. I found that really rewarding, honestly, for them to be intimately involved in this thing that’s always been important to me. I don’t think they exactly understood my job before, but after a year spent seeing me do it in all kinds of different ways (not only for this book but for The World Only Spins Forward, which Isaac and I were writing as I traveled), they really get it now.

If you were to make such a trip again, what things might you change?

We’d incorporate our children much more into the planning. One real lesson of our sometimes-disastrous Dutch sojourn was how much more buy-in we’d have had from them if they’d had the chance to participate in the initial discussions. It took them a long time to view the trip as something all four of us were doing together, not something we were doing to them.

Also, we would be rich, so we could afford to go to Costa Rica during the dry season.

You really loved certain brands of crackers in New Zealand and Costa Rica. What other treats did you discover? Any new recipes you continue to make?

I cook a mean arroz con pollo, and my rice-and-beans game is very on point. And thanks to World Market, we always have hagelslag—Dutch chocolate sprinkles—in the cabinet for special breakfast occasions.

What advice do you have for other families considering such an adventure?

My advice is to do it! It doesn’t have to be this exact adventure, it doesn’t have to be a whole year long, it doesn’t have to skip around the globe. But if you’ve long wanted to take an adventure, take it. Your kids will be fine (I mean, they will be bad sometimes, but that’s OK). The experience of being together through something real, difficult and astonishing will absolutely make up for whatever math classes they miss.

What did each of you miss most about home?

Alia: “Our Diet Coke machine. And our friends.”

Harper: “Our house and the things in our house.”

Lyra: “The stability. Knowing everyone, knowing our school, knowing that everything would be manageable.”

Dan: “Our friends and Washington Nationals games on local TV.”

Do you see life in Arlington, Virginia, in a different light now that you’ve had this experience?

I think so. I think all of us have a much better sense of the place we all have in the world, the infinite other ways of life out there. That’s really gratifying. It helps me obsess a lot less about our neighbors’ intense Sports Parenting, or enormous McMansions, or status comparisons in general. Not that I’m immune to obsessing, of course. But I think I have dialed it down.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of How to Be a Family.

Author photo credit: Alia Smith

Careful observers will note that something is missing from the cover of Augusten Burroughs’ new memoir, Toil & Trouble, in which he reveals his biggest secret yet: He is a witch. 

What is on the cover: graceful, charcoal-gray ombre loops and swirls that wend their way behind and through acid green and stark white lettering. The undulating background and crisp type artfully combine into a visual that’s wholly intriguing, a bit unsettling and a touch electrifying, hinting at what readers will find inside.

But the cover doesn’t inform in the ways you might expect. There’s no “#1 New York Times bestselling author” banner, nor a mention of Burroughs’ best-known book (later adapted into a film), 2002’s Running With Scissors. 

Rather, the author told BookPage in a call to his Connecticut home, “My only direction was, on the cover, just take off ‘#1 bestselling,’ take off every book I’ve ever written.” (Toil & Trouble is his 10th.)

He explains, “This is not a book for people who have read and loved my previous books—although it is! But really, this is for people who feel like they’re the only ones [who are witches], because I literally feel like the only one. I’ve felt like a freak my whole life because I’m a witch, a thing that doesn’t exist that absolutely exists.” 

He adds, “I know from experience that if I feel this way, and I’m one, there are others that feel the same way who will hopefully find themselves in this book.”

What does Burroughs mean by witch, exactly? Well, he’s not the black hat-wearing, broomstick-riding, cauldron-stirring cackler the word so often conjures up. Think less Halloween, more Hogwarts—except, instead of having loads of similarly gifted classmates and teachers with whom to practice the craft, Burroughs discussed his abilities only with his mother and select relatives who were witches themselves. 

Burroughs first learned of his witch-hood when he was 9 years old, he explains in Toil & Trouble. One day his school bus ride home was filled with anxiety and distress; he was certain something terrible had happened to his grandmother. It turned out she’d been in a car accident, which he had sensed because, his mother said, he was the latest in a long family line of witches.

This revelation was, he wrote, “simultaneously the most confusing and the most comforting thing anyone had ever said to me.”

Burroughs’ mother taught him to understand his unusual abilities and to keep them hidden. When she became overwhelmed by mental illness and sent him to live with another family (a stage of his life he chronicled in Running With Scissors), he no longer had anyone to talk to about this aspect of himself. 

It became a secret he kept from everyone, including his husband, until he wrote Toil & Trouble, an experience that was itself more of a bursting forth than a planned endeavor. 

He recalls, “Our Great Dane had horrible invasive surgery, and the vet said he couldn’t move [during his recovery], so we had to bring a foam mattress into the living room . . . and make a giant playpen.” The dog, Otis, stayed still if Burroughs was there watching him, so the author hunkered down with his laptop—and the words started pouring out.

“I destroyed my laptop, I broke the keyboard, it just exploded out of me—like it or not, there it was!” he says. He adds that his husband, Christopher, who is also Burroughs’ longtime agent, “didn’t have any idea what I was doing. As far as he knew, I was writing a thriller. I gave it to him, and he was like, wow.”

Wow, indeed. Not only was Burroughs’ typing ferocious enough to destroy his laptop, it also gave him tendinitis in his shoulder for about six months afterward. But with the damage, and with the freedom of declaring this is all of me, came relief. He acknowledges that this might seem surprising to those who’ve read his previous work.

I’ve felt like a freak my whole life because I’m a witch, a thing that doesn’t exist that absolutely exists.

“After writing so many memoirs, journalists would ask me if there’s anything in my life I haven’t written about, since I’ve written about stuff people would be embarrassed by, like sexual abuse, alcoholism, addiction,” Burroughs says. “But I always felt like, no, there’s nothing about myself I wouldn’t write about—except, obviously, the one thing I’m never going to write about! It was so off the table, I didn’t even realize I wasn’t replying accurately.”

Not least because, he says, “I get it, I really do. . . . ‘Oh my god, now he’s a witch!’ I wouldn’t believe it either, except I do.” However, those early years under his mother’s tutelage weren’t characterized by dissonance. He knew what he experienced, so it wasn’t strange to him that his mother or aunt practiced witchcraft in addition to their scholarly pursuits.

“My mother’s approach to witchcraft was not about spells, cloaks and herbs so much as, look, we possess neuroanatomy people haven’t found yet,” he says. “We have the ability to influence matter in ways that seem impossible and that would be called laughable and not taken seriously.”

There is the occasional spell in Toil & Trouble, particularly during Burroughs’ efforts to get Christopher to see the upsides of moving from New York City to the Connecticut country-side. These finely crafted snippets of poetry do help his goals come to fruition, but the author says spells aren’t a necessity. 

“Magic is about specificity, about needing to know exactly what needs to happen, and writing can be a way to shape that,” he says. 

But this shouldn’t be confused with mere wishing: “You do want to achieve an outcome, but you don’t achieve it through wanting. You achieve it through an incredibly disciplined and crafted and powerful focus in the mind.”

The men and their dogs ultimately did move to Connecticut, where they encountered neighbors whom Burroughs describes with a mix of acerbic wit and genuine warmth, from a foul-mouthed and highly skilled contractor to an aggressively odd opera singer. There’s also a realtor named Maura who takes Burroughs on some truly astonishing house tours (keep an eye out for the phrase “cake abattoir”) and is a witch, too. 

Majestic old trees loom over the couple’s new house in a way that sets Burroughs’ senses tingling, even as they prompt a deeper look at the eternal push-pull between humans and nature. The author also muses on things ranging from illness and addiction to gardening and tattoos, as well as the 1960s TV show “Bewitched.”

Woven throughout these topics—sometimes densely, sometimes more loosely—are Burroughs’ reflections on what being a witch has meant to him, from the teachings passed down via his ancestors to how he lives his life as a witch every day. 

Of course, it remains to be seen what life will be like for Burroughs, now that he’s put Toil & Trouble out into the world and his being a witch is no longer hidden. “My husband says witchcraft needs a new name and a new PR agent. People immediately think of bat wings being boiled,” he says. Then he clarifies, “All those words . . . like ‘eye of newt,’ are just words for different herbs.”

He adds, “The thing we call ‘witchcraft’ is really a sense and an ability that probably a lot of people have, who would never say they believe in witchcraft—yet, through the sheer power of focus, they have achieved things that would seemingly be impossible. . . . It’s time to come out of the closet and be legitimized, because it’s not some fringe weirdo thing. It’s not actually supernatural, it’s hypernatural . . . the fundamental nature of the universe.”

Ultimately, though, Burroughs knows readers will come to their own conclusions. “Either I’m completely lying, or life is a little bit more complicated than we think it is.”

Author photo credit: AXB

What comes to mind when you picture a mother? For many people, the concept of motherhood, and by extension of a family, is associated with whiteness. We spoke with Nefertiti Austin about her memoir, Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America, the reality of Black women looking to publicly adopt and how she settled into her identity as a Black mother without appeasing societal or cultural expectations.

Your book discusses not only your personal experience of becoming a single parent but the absence of positive representation of Black motherhood. How can Black motherhood be a radical act?

The fact that Black women continue to pursue motherhood despite our history in America is definitely a radical act. Brought here in chains, we were property and so were our children, but we persevered. Even when we were denied access to our kids or forced to nurse and nurture white children, we created a village of grandparents, elders, siblings, neighbors and friends who became family to keep our kids safe. At every juncture, we have laid claim to our offspring, whether or not we gave birth to them, knowing that slavery, segregation, discrimination, criminalization, sexism, homophobia, racism and erasure are no match for a Black mom’s love. 

What is the most surprising thing you learned about yourself while on the journey to adopt your son, August? How was this self-revelation different from your experience adopting your daughter, Cherish?

Before becoming a mother, I never considered giving up my free-spirited ways. I was accustomed to coming and going as I pleased, but once the decision to adopt took hold, I realized that I was ready for a more routine-driven existence. Overnight, my life expanded to include carpool, sports and family time; and I was good with that. When my daughter came along, she easily blended into the mix.

One of Toni Morrison’s many nuggets of wisdom includes the quote, “The very serious function of racism . . . is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” How do racism and, by extension, the white gaze prevent Black mothers from simply being mothers?

Though Black motherhood has often been diminished, we are still mothers. Racism makes our jobs harder because it adds another layer of stress and worry about the emotional and physical safety of our children, but it doesn’t stop us from teaching our kids to tie their shoes. We are primarily focused on loving and caring for our families and less concerned with the white gaze, unless it interferes with their welfare. Then, you will hear from us.

What was the most challenging part of writing your memoir? Did having a blog make it easier to assemble and write a full-length book?

The most challenging part of writing my memoir was being vulnerable. In order to share my story and convey the sensitivity that I feel as a Black mother raising Black children in America, I had to shed layers. I had to remove my academic hat and be open to divulge how I felt different from my peers as a child, to discuss my father’s persistent incarceration and accept that I didn’t know my mother in an intimate sense.

I definitely thought my now-defunct blog, Mommiejonesing, would make writing my memoir a breeze. I had assembled a lot of articles written by others and myself on the subject of race, motherhood and adoption. I was armed with information but no feelings beyond outrage and disgust. Plus, I was writing from a distance, and that would have kept the reader from understanding the problem of erasing Black mothers from the parenting canon. In the end, much of what I blogged about did not make it into the book.

Your book opens with you taking 5-year-old August to a Black Lives Matter rally. You discuss the very real mixture of fear and anxiety that comes with being a mother to a young Black boy in America. How does white privilege contribute to and sustain the accelerated loss of innocence for Black children?

White privilege gifts white children with a shield that blots out the ugliness of the world. They get to be kids, where mistakes are encouraged and then forgiven. They get to live moment to moment without fear that someone hates/fears/despises them because of their race. This is the power of white privilege.

Simultaneously, Black parents do not have the luxury of not teaching our children about the perniciousness of racism and how, despite best efforts, microagressions and random acts of discrimination will come their way. Our children learn to code switch (act one way with us and another way with whites) and what to do if detained by the police or surveilled by merchants—early. These lessons—i.e., innocence-snatchers—occur as early as 5 years old, because white privilege perpetuates a system with the deck stacked against us. These are our gifts to Black children to keep them safe.

In the chapter “Building My Village,” you write, “It had never occurred to me that there was an expectation for little boys to adhere to a specific masculine salutation.” How does the myth of Black hypermasculinity work in conjunction with toxic masculinity? And how can it finally become obsolete?

Personal and emotional safety is a huge issue in our community. Showing fear can be death in some spaces, so emotion or affection between men is not promoted. However, expecting boys to remain in a man box, where not showing emotion or admitting to hurt and acting like nothing touches them, is heralded as masculine and is extremely problematic. It is toxic and a recipe for a shortened life, troubled relationships and mental illness. Plus, it plays into the stereotype of the hypermasculine Black man who needs to be put down by force. We saw this in the case of Rodney King.

As long as systemic racism, mass incarceration, gangs, drugs, poverty, homelessness, unemployment, poor health, undiagnosed PTSD and undereducation prevail where the opposite is true for their white counterparts, Black toxic masculinity isn’t going anywhere.

One of the most pervasive stereotypes about Black women is the “Strong Black Woman.” In the chapter “Got My Sea Legs,” you say, “More than one friend commented that I made parenting look easy, but part of the reason I was exploring on my blog how Black women were faring as mothers was because I was feeling the weight of trying to do everything myself.” For Black mothers, especially single Black mothers, how is there power in the decision to be vulnerable?

Self-care is empowering, and we have to give ourselves permission to ask for help. We are so used to doing everything ourselves that we don’t know how to ask for help or we think that being vulnerable is a sign of weakness or admission that single motherhood was a mistake. So we put pressure on ourselves to just handle things and succumb to the societal pressure of being all things to everybody. Most women, regardless of race, take care of the children, elders and work. It’s too much, and the reality is that Black women’s mental and physical health are taking a nosedive. Heart attacks, autoimmune diseases, cancer, obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes are taking their toll on us in a big way. We suffer when we don’t take care of ourselves or each other.

How can a sense of community benefit adoptive parents? How does it shape the identity of a foster or adopted child?

Adoption communities offer a safe space for families and children. Here, we do not need to prepare an explanation for why we chose adoption. It is understood that we wanted to become parents and viewed adoption as a natural path to achieve that goal.

Kids who spend time with other kids who are adopted see their experience as normal. Among kindred spirits, they can safely share how it feels to be the only adopted child in their class, or how they met their first parents and it went well or didn’t go well. In these spaces, they do not carry the burden of explaining why they don’t look like their (adoptive) parents or why they do look like their parents but are adopted. It frees them to enjoy life as part of a special club.

How do you think the definition of a family has changed in recent years? How has the idea of a “traditional” family excluded marginalized people, especially single Black mothers?

Modern American women are free to define and create family on their terms. We have moved away from believing that a nuclear family—father, mother, 2.5 kids and a dog—is the only way to be a family. Women are less likely to be shamed for having a job or wanting to stay at home with their children. The definition of family has even expanded to include single moms, adoptive families, LGBTQIA family configurations, kinship family dynamics and mixed-raced couples.

Depending on the socioeconomics of a community, sometimes the traditional paradigm of a family was not modeled or available due to poverty, racism, incarceration, unemployment, homelessness, etc. Also, many Black families are multigenerational, with grandparents or other relatives on hand to support the entire household. Our nontraditional familial configurations deem us marginal by mainstream standards, even when we do not.

In the case of white women willing to go it alone and bring a child into the world without a partner, she is often described as badass in mainstream culture. This nod to the independence of white women does not always extend to poor women or women of color. The reason is simple. Black mothers exist at the bottom of the racialized motherhood totem pole, as we are still saddled with negative stereotypes if we’re thought of at all. There are obvious exceptions—Michelle Obama and Serena Williams come to mind—but these ladies are married and have the means to provide stable homes for their families. Single Black women who pursue nontraditional paths to parenthood receive a side-eye from Blacks and whites. It is assumed that homes headed by single Black mothers are poorer, less intellectually stimulating and a breeding ground for children who are prone to delinquency. This racist characterization of single Black mothers suggests that our kids don’t stand a chance.   

What has been your favorite Mother’s Day to date?

Mother’s Day 2014 was my hands down favorite because it was the first Mother’s Day I had with both kids. Their godfather and a close friend made brunch: salmon croquettes and waffles, two things I don’t normally eat. No one bothered to ask if I liked either dish, but the effort let me know that I was appreciated.

What has been the best piece of advice you’ve received? On the flip side, what has been the worst, and if applicable, how has it revealed the conscious and/or unconscious racial bias of the speaker?

The best advice I have received is to put my oxygen mask on first. Self-care is critical to my being the best mother possible, and every day I strive to make myself a priority.

The worst advice was that my future baby from the foster care system would be a “crack” baby. The speaker believed the 1990s media frenzy about how the first parents who used crack cocaine would produce babies who would not thrive, would be sickly, would have physical and developmental delays and grow up to be criminals. Of course, this was nonsense, and research later confirmed that foster children who were drug exposed and then placed in stable homes showed no academic or developmental differences by third grade. It all came down to children having a safe, loving and stable home environment. Sadly, this bad advice was not a function of racist unconscious basis but media-sponsored fear and misinformation run amok.

If you could go back and do one thing differently during your adoption journey, would you? And if so, what would it be and why?

My adoption journey had peaks and valleys, but the outcome was two healthy, sweet children. I wouldn’t change a thing.

How do you think the foster and adoptive system can be improved in the U.S.?

One way to improve the foster and adoptive system is to hire additional social workers and reduce their caseloads. Smaller caseloads would serve three purposes: (1) individualized support for first parents, who often unconsciously repeat their own cycles of abuse and neglect and lose custody of their children; (2) better screenings for prospective foster/adoptive parents when family reunification is no longer feasible; and (3) the ability for social workers to really bond with children on their caseload, in order to find the best matches for them.

Do you envision August and/or Cherish reading your memoir when they’re older? What is the most important thing you hope they take away from the book?

Absolutely. August has already tried to read it, but I keep taking it from him. LOL

I hope they know how much I love and admire them. I did my best to make their journeys easier and hope they remember to pay it forward.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Motherhood So White.

Author photo by Bobby Quillard