ALMOST BROWN

A biracial writer uses her father’s story to interpret her own.

Gill was born in London, but she grew up in a small town in upstate New York where everyone knew her biracial family's story. When her father, who was born in India but grew up in Kenya, married her Catholic English mother, his family disowned him for marrying a “white bride.” This estrangement, combined with Gill’s father’s intensely gendered household rules, led her to support her mother during the couple’s subsequent divorce. “At the time, it didn’t really seem like a choice between white and brown so much as a preference for Mom over Dad….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,” writes the author. “It had become a curry of emotion and allegiance and identity, everything cooked together, all at once.” Gill spent years not speaking to her father, which heightened confusion about her racial identity. The author wonders, “What does it mean to be brown?” and notes that her Punjabi cousins, whom she considers racial role models, lack the “singsong accents or delightful head wobbles or any other mango-infused idiosyncrasies often attributed to Indians.” When asked to outline her “diversity practices” for a job interview, Gill admits that she considers diversity “some deeply flawed bullshit,” and she worries that admitting to her biracial identity might lead to her stealing a job from “some better-qualified, normal, non-diverse person.” While the author never seemed to fully resolve issues about her identity, she reconciled with her father. The book’s strongest sections depict the evolution of Gill's relationship with her father and explain the historical context that shaped her parents’ lives. Unfortunately, her analysis of her biracial identity is problematically superficial and outdated, and her memoirlike sections are overly descriptive but inadequately circumspect.

A largely disappointing memoir from a biracial immigrant.