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
- 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.
- Idols, Fandoms, and Where the Moral Compass Lives
BTS partnered with Google on an AI ad. Namjoon and J-Hope went to a Chris Brown concert and posted it. One did not bother me at all. The other did not register until I saw the uproar online.
- A Girl Can Dream
Felix stood on his hind paws, his snout sniffing the air, his forepaws resting next to my bowl of tamarind water. I was overcome with… Read more: A Girl Can Dream
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.