Almost Brown

Book excerpt: "A Canadian masterpiece." —Toronto Star A tender and incisive memoir tracing the journey of a biracial, globe-trotting family that reckons with diversity, race, and identity, from the award-winning author of Eating Dirt. It wasn’t simply a question of skin, or belonging, or the Englishness of Mom, or the Indianness of Dad, or some murky middle state in between. It had become a curry of emotion and allegiance and identity, everything cooked together, all at once. With an Indian father and an English mother, young Charlotte Gill’s family houses a dizzying blend of two distinctly different cultures, featuring turbans and tube socks, chana masala and Cherry Coke. Until, one day, the family implodes. Her parents divorce, her intercultural world fractures, and a silence falls between Charlotte and her father. Charlotte heads off to university. Inheriting her family’s nomadic nature, she takes off backpacking and eagerly wears her passport down to a pulp. And as the years pass, her father’s absence feels heavier, a loss that only seems to grow. She begins to unravel how connection to family is inextricably linked to identity: her childhood, her understanding of race and diversity, and her ability to reclaim space for forgiveness and love. Almost Brown is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving two deeply eccentric parents from worlds apart and their half-brown children, who experience the paradoxes of life as it’s lived between race checkboxes. It’s a funny, turbulent, and ultimately heartwarming memoir about the brilliant messiness of a mixed-race family and a search for answers to the question, What are you?