About this item
The stunning and provocative coming-of-age memoir about Sarah Valentine's childhood as a white girl in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, and her discovery that her father was a black man. At the age of 27, Sarah Valentine discovered that she was not, in fact, the white girl she had always believed herself to be. She learned the truth of her paternity: that her father was a black man. And she learned the truth about her own identity: mixed race.And so Sarah began the difficult and absorbing journey of changing her identity from white to black. In this memoir, Sarah details the story of the discovery of her identity, how she overcame depression to come to terms with this identity, and, perhaps most importantly, asks: why? Her entire family and community had conspired to maintain her white identity. The supreme discomfort her white family and community felt about addressing issues of race-her race-is a microcosm of race relationships in America.A black woman who lived her formative years identifying as white, Sarah's story is a kind of Rachel Dolezal in reverse, though her "passing" was less intentional than conspiracy. This memoir is an examination of the cost of being black in America, and how one woman threw off the racial identity she'd grown up with, in order to embrace a new one.
About the Author
Sarah Valentine always wanted to be a writer. She began writing poetry in high school in Western Pennsylvania, where she also discovered Russian literature. She continued writing and translating poetry while her studies in Russian literature took her all over the world, including on a spectacular two-week journey on the Trans-Siberian railroad from Moscow to Beijing.After obtaining her Ph.D. in 2007 she attended a Callaloo summer writing workshop for African American writers and realized she needed to write about something much closer to home: her struggle with racial identity and the troubling family secrets that surrounded it. This led to her award-winning essay, "When I Was White," which was anthologized in Waveform: 21st-Century Essays by Women, and her memoir by the same title. Sarah has received numerous awards for her writing and scholarship, most notably a prestigious Lannan Foundation Writer's Fellowship in 2013. She has taught literature and creative writing at Princeton, University of California-Los Angeles, University of California-Riverside, and Northwestern University.Sarah enjoys writing about topics related to black and mixed-race identity, especially in various historical settings. She loves murder mysteries, ghost stories, fairytales, folklore, and myth (and of course, Russian literature) - anything that gives us a glimpse into another world. Sarah is endlessly curious, loves to travel, and believes the world is full of surprising, wonderful things to be discovered.
