SKINFOLK

An intensely personal account of growing up in a large, multiethnic family.

Guterl, professor of Africana studies and American studies at Brown University and author of Seeing Race in America, fashions a moving, elegant memoir of his childhood within the “idealized experiment” of multiracialism created by his visionary White parents, Sheryl and Bob. Born in 1970, the eldest biological child to the lawyer father and homemaker mother in suburban New Jersey, Guterl gained siblings over the years: infant Bug, adopted from Korea; Mark, “another biological white son,” born in 1973; Bear, a Black Asian 5-year-old brought out of Saigon in 1975; 13-year-old Anna, “a beautiful Asian-and-white child, a proto-adult and a surrogate mother to us all,” in 1977; and Eddie, a Black 6-year-old adopted from the South Bronx in 1983. With children representing “the three great racial divisions of humankind,” as Bob said, this multiracial family was an anomaly in the American landscape. “As members of this family, this monument to radical futurity, we live in a house that is both private and public, in a small town that is picture-perfect, in the middle of nowhere,” writes Guterl. “There, we are science fiction brought to life. And we are biblical, a living reminder of the world’s failures.” The author writes poignantly of their home, a place both protective and decorative: The front yard was like a glaringly public theater, while the backyard was the children’s private play space. As the children matured and the stewardship role of their extraordinary parents receded, tensions arose when the children were confronted more directly with society’s overarching biases and racial expectations. Bob’s death served as a major test of the family cohesion, and the author writes elegantly about his funeral, noting “the diversity of the mourning family, our Black and brown and white skin tones, our heads bowed in sorrow, reflecting mutual affection for the dead hero.”

An earnestly felt, beautifully wrought story of an American family in all its complexity.