Almost Brown: A Memoir

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

An award-winning writer retraces her dysfunctional, biracial, globe-trotting family's journey as she reckons with ethnicity and belonging, diversity and race, and the complexities of life within a multicultural household. Charlotte Gill's father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in 1960's London when the world is not quite ready for interracial love. Their union, a revolutionary act, results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Together they set off on a journey from the United Kingdom to Canada and to the United States in elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness-a dream that eventually tears them apart. Almost Brown is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving parents of two different races and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it's lived between race checkboxes. Eventually, her parents drift apart because they just aren't compatible. But as she finds herself distancing from her father too-why is she embarrassed to walk down the street with him and not her mum-she doesn't know if it's because of his personality or his race. As a mixed-race child, was this her own unconscious bias favouring one parent over the other in the racial tug-of-war that plagues our society Almost Brown looks for answers to questions shared by many mixed-race people- What are you What does it mean to be a person of colour when the concept is a societal invention and really only applies halfway if you are half white And how does your relationship with your parents change as you change and grow older In a funny, turbulent, and ultimately heart-warming story, Gill examines the brilliant messiness of ancestry, "diversity," and the idea of "race," a historical concept that still informs our beliefs about ethnicity today.

Reviews

Almost Brown is that rarest of things: a memoir that is both deeply intimate and intellectually ambitious. It fearlessly examines race and the issue of belonging, and at the same time is a tender, touching, often very funny tale of growing up and finding your way. Charlotte Gill is a narrator you come to love.Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book

What a graceful, textured world Gill gives us, living and growing between cultures, colors, and her own parents marriage and divorce. The beautiful bow she binds this gift with comes not only from the tension of a society that asks us to pick sidesone favored greatly over anotherbut from our own mixed identities and the realization that we must love ourselves whole.Carmen Rita Wong, author of Why Didnt You Tell Me

Gill fearlessly examines the complexities and subtleties of growing up mixed-race, offering an exploration of identity and belonging that is beyond skin tone and nationality, and a sharply observed commentary on ones own privilege and bias. Intimate, moving, and whip-smart, Almost Brown dazzles with humor and heart.Ayelet Tsabari, author of The Art of Leaving

With humor and insight, Gill traces the quicksand of assimilation, her immigrant parents dogged pursuit of the American Dream, and the job uniquely left to first-generation children to rediscover the homeland theyve never known. . . . A joyful read of memory and forgiveness.Hafizah Augustus Geter, author of The Black Period

This glorious story kept me up at night, pondering everyones ancestral stew and Kismet as the wondrous originsand futureof our species. Exquisitely written, deeply researched, and tenderly observed, this is memoir at its finest.Plum Johnson, author of They Left Us Everything

Brilliantly observed and astute with sharp and tender character descriptions, Almost Brown is a gorgeous telling of a complicated family history and an essential exploration of race and belonging. Gill writes with her multifold gifts of lyricism, sly humor, and an expansive understanding of what it means to have your entire identity marred by generations of dysfunction, racism, diaspora, and childhood instability. Here is a memoir teeming with abundant heart, truth, and grace, as narrated to us by an expert writer with dazzling vision.Lindsay Wong, author of The Woo-Woo

Beautifully written and appropriately irreducible, this book hit me in all sorts of funny-tender spots. Throughimmersive investigation and sharp social commentary, Gill overturns humanist platitudes and dicey purisms while recognizing the ongoing power of colonial hierarchies and racial arrangements. . . . A truly moving and insightful book.Kyo Maclear, author of Birds Art Life

Moving . . . In lyrical, near-poetic prose, Gill uses [the relationship between her and her father] as a springboard to touch on themes of belonging and identity-making relevant to anyone who has ever struggled to place themselves within their own lineage. . . . Readers should expect to have their heartstrings tugged.Publishers Weekly

Author Bio

Charlotte Gill is a bestselling and award-winning writer of fiction and narrative nonfiction. Ladykiller, her first book, was the recipient of the Danuta Gleed Award for short fiction. Eating Dirt, a tree-planting memoir, was a #1 national bestseller in Canada. Her work has appeared in Vogue and Hazlitt. Gill teaches writing in the MFA program in creative nonfiction at the University of King's College and is the Rogers Communications Chair of Literary Journalism at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She lives in British Columbia, Canada.