I’m Lakshmi G. Iyer, a Tamil American 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.
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, and the work of living inside the hyphen.
- All Essays: the full archive, by thread.
Books
- The Smudged Hyphen (2026). Essay collection on transracial adoption, Tamil American identity, and belonging.
- A Star Keeps Its Distance (2026). Novel following a K-pop music journalist.
- Hindsight (2024). Novel, set between Coimbatore and Pennsylvania.
- Why Is My Hair Curly? (2020). Middle-grade chapter book about identity and family.
Recent Essays
- What the Lens Sees
Two hundred and twenty-four professional photos arrive at eleven at night. I pick twenty. None of them, finally, for the woman walking between rooms, mid-thought.
- What the Immigrant Mother Keeps
What does the immigrant mother actually keep. Not the language, not the ceremonies, but the invisible knowledge that settles in the hands without being formally taught. On Tamil American motherhood and the arithmetic of inheritance.
- The Archive Remembers
A question to an AI about Generative Engine Optimization became a week of restructuring seventeen years of my archive, and a night of meeting the selves I used to be.
New here? Start here. More about me on the About page. To reach me, use the Contact page.