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
- Changing Views on Adoption
Six years after the guardianship papers, an adoptive mother traces how adoptee and birth mother voices changed what she thought she knew. From The Smudged Hyphen.
- Signed, With A Bookmark Inside
Signed copies of Why Is My Skin Brown? are now available, mailed straight from my desk. On the first two orders and the almost-heart next to my signature.
- Do You Still Practice Astrology?
“Do you still practice astrology?” I get some version of this question every once in a while and my answer usually is “not anymore” or… Read more: Do You Still Practice Astrology?
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.