I’m Lakshmi G. Iyer, a Tamil American children’s book author, novelist, and essayist. I write about open transracial adoption from a side the shelf usually skips: the Indian American adoptive parent. I’m a brown mother raising white children, in contact with both birth families since 2010, and most of what I write begins in that gap between how a family looks and what it carries.
As heard on NPR’s The Takeaway and BBC Asia · In The Hindu and Huffington Post · Subject of Love Chaos Kin (2025)
New · Middle Grade · Out Now
Why Is My Skin Brown?
Sarayu is twelve, American-born, and about to spend four months with cousins in Bengaluru, which has its own ideas about her skin.
From Red Panda / Westland Books. In India, at Amazon.in and bookstores. In the US, this site is currently the only place to buy the paperback.
Where to Begin
- Transracial Adoption & Parenting: sixteen years of raising children across color lines, from the adoptive parent’s side.
- Indian American Adoptive Parent: the brown mother’s side of transracial adoption, a lane almost no one writes from.
- Indian American Identity: Tamil American life in the diaspora, where the hyphen is a smudge, not a bridge.
- All Essays: the full archive, by thread.
Books
Why Is My Skin Brown? · 2026
Why Is My Hair Curly? · 2020
The Smudged Hyphen · 2026
A Star Keeps Its Distance · 2026
Hindsight · 2024
Recent Essays
- In Conversation with The Indian Book Club
The Indian Book Club sent me fifteen questions about Why Is My Skin Brown?, and answering them turned into one of the more honest conversations… Read more: In Conversation with The Indian Book Club
- The Skin I Grew Up In
My essay in The Indian Express, for the She Said column: colourism, a paati’s first word for my daughter, and the systems we fight that live inside us.
- The Last Bit I Walk Alone
The alarm goes off at five forty-five. Maggi in a thermos, a transition reel, photos by the tree, and the last bit of the walk home alone.
Bring the film to your city
Love Chaos Kin, the feature documentary about my family, is booking theaters by demand. If enough people near you want to see it, director Chithra Jeyaram can book a local screening. Tell us where you are and help fill a theater.
New here? Start here. More about me on the About page. To reach me, use the Contact page.