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Title details for Choosing Family by Francesca T. Royster - Wait list

Choosing Family

by Francesca T. Royster
ebook
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A brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicagoâs North and South Sides

As a multiracial household in Chicagoâs 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 Nelsonâs 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 Chicagoâs South Sideâitself a dynamic character in the memoirâwhere âfamilyâ 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 âqueerâ 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 joyâabout claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.

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Publisher: ABRAMS

Kindle Book

  • Release date: February 7, 2023

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9781647003760
  • Release date: February 7, 2023

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9781647003760
  • File size: 3485 KB
  • Release date: February 7, 2023
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Formats

Kindle Book
OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

Biography & Autobiography Family & Relationships LGBTQIA+ (Nonfiction) Nonfiction

Languages

English

A brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicagoâs North and South Sides

As a multiracial household in Chicagoâs 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 Nelsonâs 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 Chicagoâs South Sideâitself a dynamic character in the memoirâwhere âfamilyâ 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 âqueerâ 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 joyâabout claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.

Expand title description text
Biography & Autobiography Family & Relationships LGBTQIA+ (Nonfiction) Nonfiction