Book Review:

Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance

by Francesca T. Royster

reviewed by Raquel Vivanco

March 2025

In the coda to her memoir Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance (Abrams Press, 2023), Francesca T. Royster writes:

“When I think of the phrase ‘chosen family,’ I think of an ethical obligation to be responsible to each other that is also sacred. To keep – to both watch and to hold in one’s heart. To commit to keep those whom we know – our blood and chosen families, our friends and coworkers, our students, even ourselves – is the hard work of intimacy. It is the work that requires the risk of facing our own fears and sometimes, too, the things we hate in ourselves. To keep those whom we don’t know means to always approach any other while keeping sight of their humanity, to be open, to be surprised, and to lose control.”

Royster, a professor of English at DePaul University, writes as a queer Black feminist parenting her adopted Black daughter with her white partner. Choosing Family represents an important addition to the genre of adoptive parenting memoirs, which is dominated by the voices of straight white parents. Royster’s intersectional identities inform her insightful writing about identity and family formation, as she navigates the complexities and challenges that confront all adoptive parents.

Royster’s ambitious book covers more than just the experience of adopting. She opens with  beautifully written recollections of the women in her family who created chosen families through intentional acts of kindness and inclusivity. Her grandparents and great-grandparents created family by caring for others, even strangers, and even through their own hardships, in “efforts to stretch the boundaries of family and home to neighbors and friends in need.” Royster finds commonality between that inclusivity and the queer community’s tradition of creating chosen families, although she never felt she fit into the dominant (white) image of a queer person or queer parent. She cites Darnell L. Moore, “We are the unnamed Black sisters, brothers and nonbinary people who lived queer theory before it was popular among those in white academe.”

As a Black, queer woman raised in the 70’s, Royster has her finger on the pulse of the complexities of race and identity, recognizing the disparities and power imbalances at play in so many of our institutions, including the child welfare system. Discussing her home state of Illinois, she points to research by the sociologist Dorothy Roberts, who found that in 1995, Black children made up almost 50% of those placed into foster care, though they were only 19% of the population. Across the country, Black children remain similarly overrepresented in foster care to this day.

Royster and her partner, Ann Russo, a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Chicago, adopted their daughter Cece in 2012 when she was one month old, through The Cradle, an Illinois adoption agency, which runs the Sayers Center, a program that focuses on promoting adoption awareness within the African American community.

A common trope of adoptive parenting memoirs is the tense wait for a baby, and the fear that the birth mother might change her mind. As part of Pact’s ethical, child-centered approach to adoption, we work to change this paradigm. With deep compassion for prospective adopters’ desire to become parents, Pact reminds pre-adopters that if a mother decides she will be able to parent her own child, that must be embraced as a positive outcome, in spite of the disappointment they may feel. As an agency, Pact works to ensure that birth parents don’t feel obligated or pressured to relinquish their child because of temporary setbacks, or expectations that they shouldn’t change their minds.

From this orientation, Royster’s account of how The Cradle managed Cece’s adoption was difficult for me to read. When Cece was born, her first mother was unsure whether she would parent or place her, as she had already placed two children for adoption but was parenting her other children. Cece spent her first month after birth in the nursery at The Cradle. Surprisingly, Royster and Russo were not only allowed but encouraged to visit, feed, and spend significant time bonding with Cece, during which they understandably grew more and more attached. As an adoptive parent myself, I know it’s difficult not to feel the child is “yours” as soon as you hear about a potential match. But the process described here seems to treat the eventual placement as the desired goal, decentering the bond between the child and the woman to whom she was born, while promoting connection to the prospective adopters.

Although Royster and her partner chose The Cradle in part because it “approaches adoption through a lens of openness,” she implies that after placement, there is little if any connection with the first mother, other than pictures exchanged early on. I’m not sure how to square this with the “ethical obligation to be responsible to each other” and a commitment to the “hard work of intimacy.” Now, it’s entirely possible that Royster does not write about birth family contact out of respect for Cece and her first mom. This is Cece’s story, and all adoptive families have to balance secrecy and privacy, deciding what to disclose and what to share when. Hopefully it is or will be possible for Cece to be in contact with her birth family, who can give her a sense of her roots, and answer her inevitable questions about her origins.

Having navigated many white-dominant spaces, including academia, Royster is able to sense some of the questions about belonging her daughter will face as a Black girl, as well as an adoptee. She writes about the difficult conversations she and Russo had to have with Cece about challenging topics, such as Cece’s wish that she could be lighter-skinned like her cousins, or why she was placed for adoption. In a chapter called “The Baby Store,” a friend tells Cece that her mothers got her from the baby store, and that if she didn’t behave they might just return her. Royster explains to Cece that her first mother placed her for adoption because she couldn’t take care of her, writing that she and Russo “tried to keep it light” but Cece seemed frustrated with their positivity, asking why her first mom did not want her.

Adoption is a lifelong journey, for adoptive parents as well as adoptees, and there is always more to learn. Royster mentions that, “There have been stretches of time when [Cece’s adoption] comes up more frequently – near her birthdays, Christmas, and ‘Coming Home day’.” Though Royster doesn’t refer to it, Coming Home Day sounds a bit like Gotcha Day, a celebration of adoption that is problematic because it seems to focus only on the “positive” of connection to the adoptive family, ignoring the loss of the birth family. Pact advises adoptive parents not to shy away from the loss, grief, anger and resentment that are part of an adoptee’s experience, but to validate and make space for those feelings. This can require prioritizing a child’s emotional truth over a parent’s discomfort. It’s important for parents to initiate conversations about adoption regularly, so it becomes a normalized topic that a child feels safe bringing up without worrying that they are upsetting or hurting their adoptive parents.

Throughout her memoir, Royster’s tone is honest and relatable, grounded in real-life experiences. She doesn’t pretend to have all the answers or get everything right. Royster and her partner remind me of all the thoughtful, committed adoptive parents who participate in Pact’s Adoptive Parents of Color Collaborative and our LGBTQ+ support group. Bringing a Black, queer voice to the table, Choosing Family is a valuable addition to the reading list of any adoptive or pre-adoptive parent.

Raquel Vivanco is an adoptive parent, Director of Pact’s Adoptive Parents of Color Collaborative, and facilitates Pact’s support groups for BIPOC adoptive parents.