Publishers Weekly
10/31/2022
“Motherhood has been one way to change the narrative of the disposability of Black life,” writes Royster (Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions) in her affecting memoir. Royster, a Chicago-born queer African American woman, met her partner at the age of 32; after 13 years together, they adopted a Black child because they both were “aware of the ways that Black children had been left behind in this country.” In 2012, after passing screenings, applications, and home checks, the couple brought their daughter, Cece, home. Royster details the anxiety she felt as a Black woman raising a Black girl in what she viewed as a white supremacist society (“How can we give Cece a story about herself that counters these deeply held prejudices?”) and how parenthood helped her consider her own mother in a new light (“I’ve faced the fact that there are key parts of my mother that I didn’t know”). She also discusses the Black Lives Matter movement and her decision to not march with protestors in the summer of 2016 because she feared dying and “not being there for Cece.” Insightful and reflective, this is a moving tribute to the power of chosen family. Agent: Claire Anderson-Wheeler, RHA Literary. (Feb.)
Sisters from AARP
Francesca Royster’s moving memoir is a testament to creating the life and the family that you want . . . The book wonderfully illustrates that readers can give themselves permission to live life on their own terms and that family is what you make it.
National Book Award–winning author of South Imani Perry
Royster’s evocative and profound memoir will make you believe in love again. It will make you know that love—in its ethical, courageous, vulnerable, and committed forms—can lead us to freedom. And for that reason, this book is absolutely necessary and right on time. I’m grateful.
Cheryl L. West
In this powerful, incisive, and deeply personal memoir, Royster explores the beauty and challenges of creating family and the tenets of community necessary to sustain and nurture said family. With precision and heart-wrenching details, she calls into question everything one thinks about generational wisdom, queerness, partnering, parenting, and the consummate fear and the proportional courage that shadow it all. I savored every word.
Foreword Reviews
Memorable and fluid, professor Francesca T. Royster’s memoir Choosing Family blends her family’s history with her story of adopting an infant girl, juxtaposing personal life with political life and allowing each to illuminate the other. . . . In the lyrical memoir, the personal and political unite in a queer, interracial couple’s celebration of choosing to adopt an infant.”
coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on t Alexis Pauline Gumbs
This is the most beautiful love story I’ve read in a long time. Royster describes and cultivates a love that moves across generations, across loss, across doubt, across every social construct of separation [and] dwells in the lessons of the small and large revolutionary choices involved in being a daughter, a partner, an aunt, a community member, and a seeker.
BookPage
DePaul University professor Francesca Royster provides a look at what family really means . . . Parenthood is complex, and readers will feel Royster’s anticipation, joy and deep love, along with her fear. Her writing style has a smooth cadence and makes you feel like you’re with her every step of the way as she raises her daughter in a family that is Black, queer and chosen.”
Emily Bernard
A joyful and compassionate memoir. . . . A beautifully written work of personal reflection, Choosing Family is actually a guide to life for those of us who are interested in learning the meaning of resilience and finding happiness wherever we land.
Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and author of Salamishah Tillet
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.
The Bay Area Reporter
[An] evocative, memorable memoir . . . This reflection on family dynamics is an important addition to reading material on queer parenting, motherhood, and racial dynamics in modern society.
Anna Malaika Tubbs
In Choosing Family, Royster explores the rich legacies of queer connection, storytelling, and survival enacted by Black mothers. Eschewing dominant narratives of the nuclear family as an ideal, she joins her story with a chorus of others in the past. Her memoir reaches into history and beyond it to testify to the beautiful, varied, and profound traditions of Black love and family-making.
Nishta J. Mehra
In her memoir, Choosing Family, Royster places herself in conversation with both familial ancestors and intellectual muses in order to make an honest reckoning of her own experiences as a queer Black woman and an adoptive parent. Aptly named, this book highlights the power of choice, particularly when it comes to building family and community of all kinds, and making meaning that serves the future while honoring the past.
Ms. Magazine
The latest book by Francesca Royster will have you Feeling. The. Love. This insightful memoir celebrates the author’s chosen family, which includes her white wife and their Black adopted daughter, and illustrates the ups and downs of adoption, parenthood and queer, interracial relationships.”
From the Publisher
Affecting . . . Insightful and reflective, this is a moving tribute to the power of chosen family.”—Publishers Weekly
“Memorable and fluid, professor Francesca T. Royster’s memoir Choosing Family blends her family’s history with her story of adopting an infant girl, juxtaposing personal life with political life and allowing each to illuminate the other. . . . In the lyrical memoir, the personal and political unite in a queer, interracial couple’s celebration of choosing to adopt an infant.”—Foreword Reviews
“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
“[An] evocative, memorable memoir . . . This reflection on family dynamics is an important addition to reading material on queer parenting, motherhood, and racial dynamics in modern society.”—The Bay Area Reporter
“The latest book by Francesca Royster will have you Feeling. The. Love. This insightful memoir celebrates the author’s chosen family, which includes her white wife and their Black adopted daughter, and illustrates the ups and downs of adoption, parenthood and queer, interracial relationships.”—Ms. Magazine
“Francesca Royster’s moving memoir is a testament to creating the life and the family that you want . . . The book wonderfully illustrates that readers can give themselves permission to live life on their own terms and that family is what you make it.”—Sisters from AARP
“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 St
“Royster’s evocative and profound memoir will make you believe in love again. It will make you know that love—in its ethical, courageous, vulnerable, and committed forms—can lead us to freedom. And for that reason, this book is absolutely necessary and right on time. I’m grateful.”—Imani Perry, National Book Award–winning author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon
“In Choosing Family, Royster explores the rich legacies of queer connection, storytelling, and survival enacted by Black mothers. Eschewing dominant narratives of the nuclear family as an ideal, she joins her story with a chorus of others in the past. Her memoir reaches into history and beyond it to testify to the beautiful, varied, and profound traditions of Black love and family-making.”—Anna Malaika Tubbs, New York Times bestselling author of The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Marti
“This is the most beautiful love story I’ve read in a long time. Royster describes and cultivates a love that moves across generations, across loss, across doubt, across every social construct of separation [and] dwells in the lessons of the small and large revolutionary choices involved in being a daughter, a partner, an aunt, a community member, and a seeker.” —Alexis Pauline Gumbs, coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines
“A joyful and compassionate memoir. . . . A beautifully written work of personal reflection, Choosing Family is actually a guide to life for those of us who are interested in learning the meaning of resilience and finding happiness wherever we land.”—Emily Bernard, author of Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, an
“In this powerful, incisive, and deeply personal memoir, Royster explores the beauty and challenges of creating family and the tenets of community necessary to sustain and nurture said family. With precision and heart-wrenching details, she calls into question everything one thinks about generational wisdom, queerness, partnering, parenting, and the consummate fear and the proportional courage that shadow it all. I savored every word.”—Cheryl L. West, award-winning playwright of Fannie, Pullman Porter Blues, Before It Hits Home, and J
“In her memoir, Choosing Family, Royster places herself in conversation with both familial ancestors and intellectual muses in order to make an honest reckoning of her own experiences as a queer Black woman and an adoptive parent. Aptly named, this book highlights the power of choice, particularly when it comes to building family and community of all kinds, and making meaning that serves the future while honoring the past.”—Nishta J. Mehra, author of Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender
“DePaul University professor Francesca Royster provides a look at what family really means . . . Parenthood is complex, and readers will feel Royster’s anticipation, joy and deep love, along with her fear. Her writing style has a smooth cadence and makes you feel like you’re with her every step of the way as she raises her daughter in a family that is Black, queer and chosen.”
—BookPage
Kirkus Reviews
2022-12-14
A professor of English and gender and queer theory chronicles her experience building a family as a queer, Black mother.
When Royster and her partner, Annie, set out to adopt, they knew the process wouldn’t be easy. They spent months filling out a profile and rearranging their lives for the potential child and even more time waiting to be chosen. As the author recounts, they sought to create a new kind of family, one that could “expand the nuclear model of a family, rather than to replicate it, in order to open up the boundaries to connect to a larger community.” They faced numerous challenges: “There is risk for us as queer women in an interracial household: the risk of losing your earlier, edgier, critical self; the risk of isolation, caught between worlds; the physical vulnerability of homophobic and/or racist violence against us in being public in our private joy; and the risks of the internalization of homophobia and racism.” Royster describes the difficult conversations they had with child care providers and other members of their community as advocates for their daughter. She shows how these crucial intersections of their identity are precisely what allowed them to intentionally build a queer family model that was all their own. The text blurs boundaries, blending personal memoir artfully with thoughtful meditations on the intersections of motherhood, queer community, and Blackness. Royster includes experiences of death and loss alongside those of birth and parenting, and she draws on the work of other writers, addresses her loved ones directly in letters, and travels back through her own family lineage, where she finds a history of matrilineal family-making that defied convention. As such, the book builds on an intergenerational lineage of powerful women whose strength Royster brings to her own mothering. “We were both more interested in gathering kin than making a baby,” she writes.
A potent love letter to community in all its forms.
