Synopses & Reviews
A brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicago's North and South Sides
As a multiracial household in Chicago's North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife Annie, who's white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their forties and fifties. Choosing Family chronicles this journey to motherhood while examining the messiness and complexity of adoption and parenthood from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective. Royster also explores her memories of the matriarchs of her childhood and the homes these women created in Chicago's South Side — itself a dynamic character in the memoir — where "family" was fluid, inclusive, and not necessarily defined by marriage or other socially recognized contracts.
Calling upon the work of some of her favorite queer thinkers, including José Esteban Muñoz and Audre Lorde, Royster interweaves her experiences and memories with queer and gender theory to argue that many Black families, certainly her own, have historically had a "queer" attitude toward family: configurations that sit outside the white normative experience and are the richer for their flexibility and generosity of spirit. A powerful, genre-bending memoir of family, identity, and acceptance, Choosing Family, ultimately, is about joy — about claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.
Review
"Affecting…Insightful and reflective, this is a moving tribute to the power of chosen family." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Choosing Family is a memoir as a chorus. Not only do we hear the stories of generations of Black people in Chicago, mothers and grandmothers, who fought to make their way in the world, but Royster shows us how she survived and thrived when her very being as a queer Black woman pushed her to the margins. It turns out that chosen families are the key, and the diversity, dignity, and care they provide save lives and make remarkable storytelling." Salamishah Tillet, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and author of In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece
Review
"The book builds on an intergenerational lineage of powerful women whose strength Royster brings to her own mothering….A potent love letter to community in all its forms." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance is a brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicago's North and South Sides. As a multiracial household in Chicago's North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife, Annie, who's white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their 40s and 50s. Choosing Family chronicles this journey to motherhood while examining the messiness and complexity of adoption and parenthood from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective. Royster also explores her memories of the matriarchs of her childhood and the homes these women created in Chicago's South Side--itself a dynamic character in the memoir--where "family" was fluid, inclusive, and not necessarily defined by marriage or other socially recognized contracts.
Calling upon the work of some of her favorite queer thinkers, including Jos Esteban Mu oz and Audre Lorde, Royster interweaves her experiences and memories with queer and gender theory to argue that many Black families, certainly her own, have historically had a "queer" attitude toward family: configurations that sit outside the white normative experience and are the richer for their flexibility and generosity of spirit. A powerful, genre-bending memoir of family, identity, and acceptance, Choosing Family, ultimately, is about joy--about claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.
About the Author
Francesca Royster is a native of Chicago's South Side and a professor of English literature at DePaul University in Chicago, where she teaches classes on African American literature and culture, Shakespeare, and gender and queer theory. She is the author of two academic books, Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon and Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era. She received her PhD in English literature from University of California, Berkeley. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Literati, and Feminist Studies, among others. She lives in Chicago.