Some of you have been waiting for this. Some of you didn’t know it was coming. Either way, I’m glad you’re here to read this.
For a long time, the essays that make up this book lived in different corners of the internet — on Women’s Web, on Mutha Magazine, on Adoptive Families, and mostly here, on this Substack. They were written across ten years, in the margins of a life that kept surprising me.
What I didn’t know, until I started putting them together, was that they were always one book. A book about our family. About how we came to be. About what it means to be two brown adults raising two white children and one brown baby, in an America that keeps trying to make sense of us. About infertility and adoption and immigration and food and hair and politics and joy. About belonging — mostly.
The book is called The Smudged Hyphen: Essays on Family, Identity, and the Art of Belonging.
The title comes from something I wrote in the prologue — about how our children smudge the hyphen a little, melding identities that were never supposed to go together, making something new. That’s what this family has done to me. That’s what these essays try to hold.
If you’ve been reading me for a while, you’ll recognize some of these pieces. They’ve been revised, in small ways. Others you haven’t seen before. Together they tell a story I’ve been circling for years, and I think I’ve finally found the shape of it.
You can find it on Amazon in paperback and as an eBook. I would be so grateful if you read it, shared it, gifted it to someone who might need it, or left a review.
And if you’ve ever had to explain your family to a stranger — or chosen not to — this book is for you.
Thank you for being here. It means more than I know how to say.
Lakshmi Iyer 