Nishta J. Mehra writes with insightful, clearsighted vulnerability in Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion about the layered ways in which her wife, Jill, and their 6-year-old son, Shiv, perceive the world and shatter expectations—even some that come from within.

As Mehra came of age, she navigated the then largely segregated city of Memphis as someone who was born Hindu but raised Episcopal. Her memoir reveals a woman straddling worlds into college, when she fell in love with an older white woman; they married and successfully adopted Shiv, who is black, as an interracial same-sex couple. The heart of Brown White Black delves into the contrast between Mehra’s coming out to her father before his sudden death and Shiv’s identity as a gender nonconforming child, which she can now view with some hard-won perspective.

“I think there’s almost a universal experience of bumping up against material that you’ve maybe been writing around, thinking that you might be able to get away with not digging too much past the surface,” she says. “Or just sort of dropping a mention into the text—but, of course, once you realize that’s what you’ve been doing, you know you have to go there. For me, the part of writing that’s hard is the thinking that accompanies the writing; once I’ve done the work of exploring my own relationship to something, determining what I think about it, the writing starts to build itself.”

In the case of her father’s death, in the summer between the two years she was earning her MFA at the University of Arizona, she explored her memories of him and grieving for him as part of her master’s thesis. Upon graduation, “I put that material away for a few years, returning with a bit of critical distance.” The resulting work became her debut, a book of essays, The Pomegranate King (2013).But “when writing Brown White Black, it became clear to me that I needed to look again at those experiences through the new lens of being a parent myself,” she says.  

Mehra says she thinks of the interlocking essays in Brown White Black as “a very complicated Venn diagram.” She realized as she wrote the book that “there was no way to separate any part of my family’s subject from another—how can I talk about being a mixed-race family without also talking about being a same-sex couple or being adoptive parents? It was almost like an exercise in visualizing the concept of intersectionality.”

Drawing inspiration from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Mehra says their work “helped me see how to put one’s own life in smart and impassioned conversation with the world around you.”

The result is a collection that is also a refreshing hybrid of family and parenting memoir told through a necessary lens. Mehra writes about everyday racism and microaggressions in ways that are often profound and sometimes tinged with humor. Mostly, she writes with grace about the general awkwardness of strangers who often impede the lives of those who do not fit traditional gender norms and expectations as well as the layered racial, ethnic, and class biases, assumptions, and privileges that come with trying to live and love at the margins of American culture.

“My hope has always been to create more space for all of us to live more authentically, whether your family looks anything like mine or not,” Mehra says. “I firmly believe that interrogating our old, default ways of doing things is a practice that ultimately benefits us all. Expanding our collective imagination of what a family could, should, or does look like is a conversation I’m proud to be a part of.”

Joshunda Sanders’ debut picture book, I Can Write the World, will be released in June.