Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance

by Francesca Royster

Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance is a brilliant literary memoir of chosen family and chosen heritage, told against the backdrop of Chicago’s North and South Sides.

As a multiracial household in Chicago’s 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 Nelson’s 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 40s and 50s. 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 Chicago’s South Side—itself a dynamic character in the memoir—where “family” 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 “queer” attitude toward familly: 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 joy—about claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Queer, LGBT, Feminism, Adult, Audiobook

288 pages, Hardcover

Published February 7, 2023

Reviews

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a beautiful story of a modern family full of dreams, fears, shames, loves, hopes, and so much more. It’s an important book because these never family models are becoming more common but so many of them have no footprint to model their own after. Many are winging it with varying degrees of success.

This book can let such families know where struggles might be more common than realized and where things deserve highlighting and celebrating. Acknowledges many of the ways this country is broken and what it means for this family without lasting blame or trying to solution it. Sounds like a beautiful family.

[Emily Warfield · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was so excited to read this that I tried to give it a fair shake even after I learned who the author’s wife was (another feminist professor at the same Catholic college whose own nonfiction book recently drove me insane). Unfortunately, as compelling as the topic was, the writing was lackluster — it doesn’t have a strong voice or interesting style— and the political claims of the title really disappointed. By the time I got to the parenthetical about how it’s wrong to shame Richard Nixon for his looks, after the parenthetical celebrating Obama, I had to take a deep breath and a long break. The “queer motherhood and Black resistance” this book is interested in is primarily this sort of shallow neoliberal identity politics that drives me so batshit. It’s a memoir that devotes much more space to pondering the symbolic violence of Barbie than it does to pondering the material violence of racial capitalism in the private adoption industry that Royster and her white wife benefitted from — maybe two sentences in Part I?

There are a few pages after the Barbie chapter that refuse to confront the topic head-on, largely seeking to distance private adoption from adoption through the foster system. Is there that much difference between being directly forced to give up your children by the state and being indirectly coerced by the state’s impoverishing economic policies, as was the case for her daughter’s birth mother? Especially when private adoption is so much more likely to also sever kinship, community, and cultural ties in racially violent ways— something Royster never acknowledges? “The suspicions of adoption for some working-class folks in the Black community might have some justification” is as far as she will go. Mostly, she attempts to downplay these concerns, lapsing back into respectability politics as she does periodically throughout the book to assure us that Black-mother-as-criminal is a stereotype. Yes, it is, but more salient here is how frequently Black mothers are actually criminalized, particularly for poverty-related survival behaviors that make choosing family difficult-to-impossible for many.

Royster and her wife clearly love this little girl. As always with memoir reviews, this isn’t a judgment on the author’s life but on how it’s depicted, and how it’s depicted here also shows that these women are very invested in not interrogating too deeply why they were able to adopt their daughter in the first place— from a birth mother who evidently also loved her and was terribly conflicted about giving her up but knew it was in her and her family’s best interests financially. That early, oddly casual acknowledgement of the socioeconomic circumstances compelling this choice landed like a gut punch for me, especially alongside comparisons the author makes between her own family and QTBIPOC ball families— the exact poor Black mothers and children who wind up separated by legal systems, not sanctioned by them.

The book is mostly interesting as a testament to how the smart and compassionate people who become well-situated humanities professors will critique systems of domination right up until the point they start to benefit from their violence instead of suffer under it. Does Royster realize how she sounds every time she points out her and her family’s multigenerational financial stability, home ownership, respectable employment, and marriage, offering them up as prime defenses of her motherhood? Yes, but I suspect she only imagines her audience as other queer and Black people in similarly privileged positions— not those criminalized mothers, those ballroom mothers, those single and impoverished and sex trading and street economy-involved and unstably housed and self-medicating and mentally ill mothers who are disproportionately Black, who lose their kids every day through both state and private routes. To be clear, I don’t think that engagement with these systems as foster or adoptive parents is so black-and-white as to be condemnable; I think it’s a difficult, morally grey area. I also understand that agency for birth mothers is complex and so is the interplay between race and upper class status, but I am deeply disappointed that a book with this subtitle refused to wrestle with those difficult topics in favor of quieting the moral anxieties of professional-class gays.

[Ashlee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notes from reading:

-I hate that it’s not narrated by the author, professional narrators have this specific tone that drives me crazy
-3% in and I already know I’m going to love this expansive meditation on family and motherhood.
-I love how the author transposes her family dynamics growing up onto queerness; it’s not about sexuality but rather about transgressing [hetero]normativity and making community with who you are and what you have. And of course it makes so much sense that blackness, especially in America, mirrors queerness by thriving on the “outside” and challenging white norms
-The end of chapter 3 is exactly where I’m at: Will I lose my queerness if I have a baby? What will happen to my community? Will I regret giving up the freedom that our queer ancestors have fought so hard for me to have?
-“I know it’s boring but I want a baby. I want a house.”
-“there is risk for us as queer women in an interracial household. There is risk of losing your earlier, edgier, critical self. The risk of isolation, caught between worlds.”
- “chosen family has always been a tactic of survival for groups of oppressed people”
- Fostering is systemic in punishing women by taking away their children + incarceration
- Very interesting learning about adoption in this way since most of my baby content has been ab donor conception.
- I’ve somehow never considered the power dynamic between adult and child in actual context and this is giving me a lot to think about.
- Very interesting to hear about Black mothering and the complexities of that intersection with queerness and interracial relationships and adoption
- I love that the last chapter of this was the adoption ritual. very beautiful, full circle, and representative of the entire thesis: queer family as more than just the sexualities and genders who comprise the family, but also the subversion of the entire damn script

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a beautiful memoir, full of sweetness and optimism in spite of the pain and hardship it also delves into. I hope to re-read this in the future if/when I become a parent!

[Margarette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reviewing memoir is hard; how do I rate an individual’s telling of their own life story?

I am a queer black woman, married to a white person, and we are trying to figure out how to make a family. I wanted this book to answer some really big questions and help me grapple with what it means to have a baby in this particular circumstance.

It doesn’t really do that. It doesn’t deal enough with the horrors of state or private adoption, or how they pushed past those horrors to decide that adoption was still the best option for them. It doesn’t deal enough with race and white supremacy. How do they grapple with racism when it shows up in their own family? How do you respond to your child’s feelings of abandonment, inevitable in the adoption process? As older parents, how do they manage their fears of mortality? How do you raise a strong girl in the world, besides banning Barbie? Maybe these questions are bigger that the confines of this text but I yearned for the author to try.

Some of this book fully missed me - there’s a whole chapter on the author’s tattoos??? And some of it was truly powerful. The author’s evocation of the Mothers that came before was very moving. And I am grateful for the author’s reminder that queer/Black folks make our families through love and not just through blood.

Unfortunately, this book disappoints.

[Laura Sackton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful memoir about Black queer motherhood. It’s about the complexities of adoption and interracial partnership, about aging and grief, and about the ongoing work of, as the title states, choosing family. Choosing family, as Royster asserts over and over again, is a physical, emotional, spiritual, communal act. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It doesn’t happen only once. It’s ongoing. She writes, simply and beautifully, about this choosing, and the heartaches and joys that it has brought her.

Read my full review here: https://booksandbakes.substack.com/i/...

[a.rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

i’ve always loved the idea of chosen family. maybe it stems from being an adoptee and being queer, but knowing that bonds beyond genetics tie you to people is so special

[Anna Carvlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Francesca Royster’s memoir Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance walks the reader through her journey of becoming a mother through adoption while living on the North Side of Chicago with her wife. Creating kinship and community as a queer person demands a re-creation of the meaning of family within a society that still upholds the “SNAF” or the “Standard North American Family,” a term dubbed by sociologist Dorothy Smith, as the quintessential achievement. Having fallen in love with a woman and making a life with her, Royster is obliged to become comfortable and, as a writer, naturally examine her role as an “other” within, to use bell hooks’ terminology, an imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchal society. But she reveals a fissure in her mindset during which the reader understands the depths of her yearning to attain an element in her life that is not “other.” Through her writerly, witness lens, combined with her perspective gained from having lived as a sexual and ethnic minority, Royster contends sincerely and tenderly with her adopted daughter’s diagnosis of Marfan syndrome.

To me, the moment Royster examines her own thinking about her daughter’s diagnosis is the crux of her story. Royster had lived on the margins, an outsider in many ways. Even with her artist’s sensibilities and her habituation to being different, her daughter’s genetic test prompted her to recognize her own desires and perhaps not-so-laudable aspirations for perfection or, at the very least, normalcy.

Her daughter had been showing mild signs of the syndrome. Before the genetic results were returned, Royster looks at a photo of her daughter. She recalls, “I wanted to twist away from that word, but it caught me. Normal. ‘Please be normal,’ I whisper to the photograph. Where in the hell did that come from? When did normal become my measure of beauty, of strength? Wasn't that what I'd always avoided for myself?”

Royster’s entire identity had been wrapped up in queerness: both in identifying as queer in terms of her sexuality, and in her life’s work, by writing about the “rebellious spirit in post–civil rights black music” in her book Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post Soul Era. Her identity had also been tightly linked to Black struggle in America. She had placed her hopes for a new day into her daughter. She continues, “As I worried about Cece’s future, I might also have been mourning that vision of Cece as my own Wonder Girl.”

Not only did Royster hope for a “normal” child, she wanted her girl to go above and beyond, to be superhuman, a demigoddess with magical powers. Do we all want that for our children? Her aspirations are reminiscent of the experiences of minorities in the work world: to be seen as functional, regular, good enough, they actually need to perform better. Her imagining of a child with superpowers may be especially relatable for LGBTQ+-identifying people, who are forced to live in defense of their entire being in a broader society that perpetually questions whether gay couples can have “normal” children. Studies have been conducted to indicate that, yes, gay couples can have children with “good outcomes.” Margaret Gibson discusses these ideas in an anthology chapter titled “Queer Mothering and the Question of Normalcy.” While the emphasis on “normal” has led to positive gains for LGBTQ+ people legally, she argues, the avoidance of research on queer families with differences or with different aspirations has led to a dearth of recognition of families who lie outside the mainstream and don’t aspire to “fit in.” LGBTQ+ people are less allowed to have children who fall outside the bounds of what our society deems normal. An LGBTQ+ person with a disabled child is automatically placed in yet another “other” category from which they need to defend their existence and struggle—an exhausting prospect.

But Royster has been primed for the task of reorienting her aspirations and fully loving her child. Of queer people, especially queer people of color, she says, “…we are never just individuals. We need home but our homes are always part of something else, a larger project of survival that is connected to others’ projects of survival, even when it appears that we are hunkering down, going underground, tending our yards and window boxes.”

[rita ✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up Choosing Family because I find it very important to read from the diverse sectors of the LGBTQ+ community, as a member and as an ally to those in the community that identify differently than me. I also find adoption a genuinely interesting topic of conversation in general, but especially when paired up with the queer community. So even thought I personally have no desire to become a mother ever, I still want to hear other people's perspectives and stances.

Francesca Royster wrote a bit of an inconsistent book for me. The writing itself isn't anything mindblowing; she doesn't have the strongest or most prominent voice and so a lot of it failed to connect emotionally. I can imagine that someone with perhaps a more defined voice would have managed to make me emerse more in their story. Royster also doesn't really go deep enough in the topics she approaches -- I feel like I didn't get a real understanding of the process of private adoption or even just on how her queerness melded the events of her life differently than that of a cis-straight person.

I just expected a bit more, even if I didn't go in with super high expectations as this is a new author for me.

[Jeremiah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think if I weren't an adopted person myself and currently looking to adopt my own child, I would have rated this as a four or five star book. I appreciate Royster's exploration of family development, found family, identification as mother in relationship to her own mother, as a queer woman, etc.

Her exploration of the adoption process, which is a part of many queer partnership's experience of expansion and child-rearing, was lacking, at best. Her commentary about race and gender exploitation seemed fairly abstract, missing some of the overt ways that adoption and racism intersect. She also didn't talk much about how the adopted family formed; the major stressor that she mentions in their daughter's life was a genetic condition that may or may not have ramifications for her in the future. There was a page about the "You're not my mother" process, a key part of adoption development.

I think I lost track about what the book was actually about. Too many themes that she dabbled in without a cohesive focus on one or two.

[Siobhan Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great read, and I really love that it was highlighted for Pride Month, as I don't know if I would have come across it otherwise. Royster's account of living life as a queer black woman, her families, both chosen and not, and the adoption of her daughter were all wonderful. Parts of this book were a love letter from a mother to her child, others the realities of being a queer, black woman in the United States and others were a lesson in that blood is not the only thing that ties families together.

Honestly, while I wish at times that this book delved more into topics, I appreciate and respect that it's not Royster's job to share her traumas with an audience - I think the approach she took was balanced, interesting and just overall a pleasure to read. I appreciate that it made me rethink certain things, and the language/approach I take with different topics.

[chats · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved so much about this book about what family can look like, and about parenting in a world that can be both frightening and joyful. As something billed as a memoir of queer resistance, I found myself wanting it to go DEEPER throughout. Adoption can be an inherently traumatizing process, and I thought that was strangely glossed over. Also I know the format is challenging, but I craved more of an exploration of how people were routinely showing up for the author and her wife and child. She is clearly invested in her community - how has she tended to those relationships and how others they tended to them when the work of parenting can be all consuming?

Anyway. Maybe that’s a different book. But it’s one she gestured toward and I look forward to maybe reading it someday.

[Crystal Toller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a memoir of the author's relationship with her partner, Annie Russo and their tale of adoption of a African American child and their life in Chicago. The book was well edited and very well written. The story of their life and their tale of adoption really resonated with me. I loved reading about their child, CeCe and their life together in Chicago. I especially appreciated the author's fear of protesting because of her child and what would happen to her child if she was jailed or killed because I have felt the same way. A very enjoyable and enlightening read.

[Jen Bracken-Hull]

Called to mind several times Saidya Hartman’s “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments”. Loved the questions asked around straightness: what is a straight life? And queerness: what constitutes a queer life? Is it possible for people to cross the barriers of identities into one or the other? In other words, Royster argues that her mother, who didnt identify as queer, exemplified a queer life due partially, if not largely, because of the ways Black Americans have survived and adapted by choosing their own kin and redefining family for themselves since at least the days of enslavement.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Choosing Family" by Francesca T. Royster is a gorgeous, thoughtful, intimate, and vulnerable journey through Royster's past and present. She intertwines her own queer history with her daughter's childhood, exploring the definition and role of family in her, her wife's, and her daughter's lives. "Choosing Family" led me to question what I know about queerness, about adoption, about Black motherhood, and brought me to a deeper, kinder, more intentional exploration of where my understanding of my own queerness begins and ends.

[Martissa Williams]

What a tender book of love in all its beautiful forms! To create a queer life spans so much wider than sex and attraction. The liberation in the deviance of queerness is the ability to choose and love beyond a script and bounds. To pull apart the threads of homogeneity, in order to ink out more from this big beautiful world. Choosing Family shows the journey of one woman, her chosen love as they create a community for their miracle baby. Francesca does not skip the hard parts while having a beautiful way of not centering the inevitable pain of loving, living, and ultimately dying.

[Susie Dumond · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this narrative memoir, Francesca Royster shares the journey she and her wife, a multiracial couple in their 40s and 50s, undertook to adopt and raise a child. In addition to her own personal story, Royster calls on queer and gender theory to explore intentional parenthood and a more fluid understanding of families. It's a beautifully personal story, both widely relatable and unique in the specific issues Royster and her wife faced. A fantastic book about modern parenting and families.

[Randi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book as a giveaway on Goodreads for review.

So I had maybe 50 pages left and unfortunately the book was ruined by a fur child. So I could not finish.

What I read was a refreshing and candid look into navigating life as a queer black woman, choosing your own family. I will be replacing my copy so I can finish the final pages.

[Elizabeth Sanders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, engaging writing, intriguing discussions and explorations of multiple identities and navigating them at different times in her life. Encountered many new ideas and enjoyed learning about them as I read.

[Davonna Grubbs · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very special story! Written very well. I especially loved the first half, talking about women in her family and adopting her daughter. The second half sparked some thought for me, of how I will approach certain subjects with my future kids. Lovely book.

[Bethany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, raw, and inspiring memoir. There is wisdom woven throughout and each story is written in a way that captivates the reader. One of my favorites and a great memoir for those who are curious about the vast opportunities that lie with queer love and family.

[Megan Sanks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor Royster was a thoughtful, generous, and wonderful professor when I took her Toni Morrison class in 2016. I appreciated listening to this memoir of her creating her family and the insights she shared.

[Lenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important memoir that I thoroughly enjoyed listening to. Took one star off because it was easy to get lost in the plot. The author explored a lot of themes which complicated the storyline (although it's easy to do when trying to distill one's life into 300 pages or less).

[Megan Rossman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a sweet and encouraging memoir about a queer couples’ experience building their family. The author decides late in life that she wants to be a mother. I enjoyed reading about a queer interracial couple’s journey into parenthood.

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really sweet memoir that shows what queer family can look like and exploring how race, socioeconomic status, gender, sexuality, age, and ability shape motherhood and mothering. Also touches on illness and death of a parent, religion, and the pandemic as topics that affected this chosen family.

[Whitney Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a 4.5 rounded up because I appreciated the content, the topic, and the love that is chosen family.

[ronne hartfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

inspiring testament

I found this book a remarkable call to create, nurture and sustain a caring circle. Well told, candid, open minded and open hearted.

[Kayla Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this copy from Goodreads and I really liked this book and it gives a chance inside her life.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

".... didn't end my grief, but it interrupted it" (p. 119).

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read as audiobook.