Almost Brown - A Memoir

Informationen zum Autor Charlotte Gill Klappentext "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 mom?-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 favoring 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 color 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 heartwarming 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"-- Leseprobe 1 A Little Circle My father’s skin is the color of a medium-­roasted coffee bean. His eyes are so dark you can’t tell the pupils from the irises. His hair was once nearly black, but now it’s white—­at least it is when he doesn’t get around to coloring it. He disguises his gray from time to time at a salon he’s been visiting for at least a couple of decades. We probably share the same dye shade—­ espresso brown, according to my drugstore box. He has half-­moons of darker pigmentation beneath his eyes, which are slightly puffy about the upper lids and slightly downturned at the outer corners. Many of us in the family share this trait, and if we aren’t smiling in photos, we tend to look sleepy, sad, or both, even if we’re having the best time. My dad has a pleasingly round face, also a common family feature, inherited from my grandmother. His family is Sikh, although he isn’t what I’d call religious. And neither am I, which pleases him immensely, especially since my mother has become more churchgoing with time. In this way, if not elsewhere, I’m a fulfillment of his design. He was born in Punjab, India, and has lived on four continents, but somehow he ended up in South Texas. He lives in McAllen, a city known for its Customs and Border Patrol detention facilities and gargantuan public library fashioned from an abandoned Walmart. Wherever he goes, people still call him “Dr. Gill.” Once a physician, always a physician. He’s also an Anglophile. For years, he lived in the United Kingdom. It’s where he trained to be a surgeon. He still loves marmalade and orange pekoe tea and table manners and the Queen’s English and generally most kinds of fusty British pomp except the royal family, whom he quietly dislikes. He sprinkles his sentences with “bloody well” and “bloody hell” when he’s grumpy. He still defends Great Britain as the height of civilized achievement, which I sometimes think is a form of internalized prejudice. For a man ...

Product details

• Authors: Charlotte Gill
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 06.06.2023
• EAN: 9780593443019
• ISBN: 978-0-593-44301-9
• No. of pages: 256
• Dimensions: 146 mm x 217 mm x 23 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries