Hello from the FCCNY Readers Guild!
Calling all FCC members who love to read and talk about books. Pull up a chair and join us for our next gathering!
BOOK FOR DISCUSSION: WHEN I WAS WHITE: A Memoir, by Sarah Valentine
MEETING DATE & TIME: Friday evening, August 7, from 7:30p to 8:45p. EDT.
WHERE: Register to receive a Zoom link and password to the conversation.
Participation is free, but registration is required. You must have active membership in order to register.
The books we read include, but are not be limited to books with direct adoption themes.
At our first meeting, we had a thought-provoking discussion about The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, by Lisa See. Thanks to all who attended for your wonderful contributions! Our next book is a memoir about race and identity. (See more details in the write-up from goodreads below.)
We look forward to meeting you and talking on Zoom soon!
Mary Child and Diane Gnagnarelli
Questions/Comments: programs@fccny.org
ABOUT THE BOOK:
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.
