In 1965 I was adopted as a baby by a 54-year-old white widow who lived on the coast of Maine. She insisted that I, too, was white and had the birth certificate to prove it. But the boys at the bus stop called me “nigger,” and on the all-white playground, kids chanted, “chocolate chip….” It wasn’t until I was 12, when my uncle asked if I knew my “real name was Heather” that I even knew I was adopted.

 

With a humorous, honest, and intimate voice, A Gangly Brown-Skinned Girl from Nowhere is an unflinching look at race and how mine—or my lack of one—has defined me. Similar to Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know, my journey illuminates the feeling of displacement while growing up with brown skin in a white world and living with a deep longing for belonging, and like Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance, brings me on a search to unlock family secrets to find out who I really am. 

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From the shores of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, to a steakhouse in a Nairobi office building, A Gangly Brown-Skinned Girl from Nowhere is an unforgettable portrait of adoption, race, self-creation, and identity.