Ask the Author: Rachel Howard
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Rachel Howard
My husband and I adopted a child out of the foster care system, so I was in the foster care world, and the tensions inherent to it fascinated me. I thought maybe I could bring the reader inside those tensions, not merely summarize them or editorialize about them. Then I saw a brochure put out by a foster services agency advertising for “Families that take risks.” I thought, That’s a strange thing to advertise for. It seemed to me the brochure was basically saying, Yeah, you need to be a little crazy to try this. In what other context would anyone say a child needs parents that take risks?
I kept going with the idea because I realized I had seen memoirs about adoption—mostly about adopting babies from overseas—and I had seen novels about foster children, but always from the foster child’s point of view. And there’s good reason for that—the foster child is the most innocent and vulnerable person in the situation. But I thought if I could write a novel from the foster parent’s point of view, it could create a triangulated space for the reader to inhabit this particular kind of adoption experience in a new way. In foster care, all the players—foster parents, social workers, psychologists—are doing their best, really, even though when you’re looking at the system from the outside the impulse is to judge all the people involved for being selfish or falling short. They’re all doing their best, but we’re talking about an inherently very difficult situation. And that’s more important than ever to remember as our country continues separating children from families at the borders—no one should be blithe about routing children to foster care. And the number of children in foster care is growing every year.
I kept going with the idea because I realized I had seen memoirs about adoption—mostly about adopting babies from overseas—and I had seen novels about foster children, but always from the foster child’s point of view. And there’s good reason for that—the foster child is the most innocent and vulnerable person in the situation. But I thought if I could write a novel from the foster parent’s point of view, it could create a triangulated space for the reader to inhabit this particular kind of adoption experience in a new way. In foster care, all the players—foster parents, social workers, psychologists—are doing their best, really, even though when you’re looking at the system from the outside the impulse is to judge all the people involved for being selfish or falling short. They’re all doing their best, but we’re talking about an inherently very difficult situation. And that’s more important than ever to remember as our country continues separating children from families at the borders—no one should be blithe about routing children to foster care. And the number of children in foster care is growing every year.
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