In 2009, months before the twins came home, I went looking for a book. Not a how-to. A memoir. Someone who looked like me, or like the children I was about to raise, telling me what the years ahead would feel like. I found shelves of adoption memoirs. Nearly every one was written by a white mother. I wrote about that search, and what Google handed me instead, in Desi Parents Adopting: What I Typed Into Google in 2009.
This is the list I wish had existed. Memoirs and essay collections about adoption written by people of color: adoptees first, then the parents. Two rules hold it together. Adoptee voices come before anyone else’s, including mine. And no book here treats adoption as a rescue.
It is a companion to my longer list, Books About Transracial Adoption, which covers the guides, the oral histories, and the picture books. This one stays with narrative nonfiction, the books you read in a weekend and carry for life. Where the two lists overlap, the annotation lives there and I point you to it here.
Last updated: September 2026.
Start With Adoptee Voices
If you are new to adoptee memoir, three books open the door: Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know, Angela Tucker’s You Should Be Grateful, and Jane Jeong Trenka’s The Language of Blood. They anchor my other list and I will not repeat myself. Start there, then come back for these.
Surviving the White Gaze, by Rebecca Carroll
Carroll, a Black adoptee, grew up the only Black person in a small New Hampshire town, raised by white parents who loved her and could not see her. The book covers the years it took to build a Black self that nobody around her had modeled. Blunt about her birth mother, blunt about her adoptive parents, blunt about herself. Read it for what a loving home can still fail to give.
Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related., by Jenny Heijun Wills
A Korean adoptee raised in Canada goes back to Seoul and meets the family she was separated from, including a younger sister who becomes the center of the book. Written in fragments, some a page long, some a single sentence. The form is the argument: reunion does not arrive as one story.
Fugitive Visions, by Jane Jeong Trenka
Trenka’s second memoir picks up after The Language of Blood, once she has moved back to Korea for good and found that going home is its own exile. Angrier than the first book, and more political. Read them in order.
A Living Remedy, by Nicole Chung
Chung’s second memoir is about losing both adoptive parents within two years, her father to a health system that failed him, her mother to cancer during the pandemic. Adoption sits underneath every page, in who gets to grieve and how. It belongs on this list more than on my other one.
Red Dust Road, by Jackie Kay
The Scottish poet, born to a Nigerian father and a Highland mother and adopted by white communists in Glasgow, goes looking for both birth parents. Funny, which most adoption memoirs are not. Her father, when she finds him in Abuja, is a born-again preacher who wants to pray over her. That scene alone is worth the book.
Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption, by Susan Devan Harness
Harness was taken from her Salish family and adopted by a white couple in Montana in the 1960s, in the years before the Indian Child Welfare Act. Her memoir is one of the clearest accounts of what that era did to Native children, and of what it costs to return to a nation that does not know you. If you found this page searching for Indian adoption and meant Native American adoption, this book and the next one are the ones you came for.
A Child of the Indian Race, by Sandy White Hawk
White Hawk, Sicangu Lakota, was adopted by a white missionary family as a small child and spent decades getting home. She went on to found the First Nations Repatriation Institute and to organize the welcoming-home ceremonies that many Native adoptees describe as the first time they were claimed. Part memoir, part organizer’s record.
Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin
The anthology that gave adoptee critique a shelf of its own. Essays, poems, and art by transracial adoptees from many countries, hard to find for years and back in print now. Uneven, as anthologies are, and still the book I hand to anyone who thinks adoptees who object are ungrateful.
The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be, by Shannon Gibney
Gibney, a Black transracial adoptee, writes her memoir as a speculative novel, with a second self who was never given up running alongside the one who was. Published for young adults and read, in my house, by the adult. The doubling is the closest description of an adoptee’s interior life I have seen in print.
Yes, Chef, by Marcus Samuelsson
Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia, orphaned by tuberculosis at three, and adopted with his sister by a Swedish family. Most people shelve this as a chef’s memoir. Read it as an adoption book and it changes: the Gothenburg kitchen, the return to Addis Ababa, the father he finds alive. For the reader who would never pick up a book with adoption in the title.
Indian and South Asian Adoption Memoirs
India is the second-largest source of children adopted internationally into the United States. There is still no memoir by an India-born adoptee raised in America from a major publisher. Not one. The two that readers know are Australian. The third is Catalan. The American voice exists in essays, in films, in podcasts, on a site called Dear Adoption, and in one small-press memoir listed below. The Juggernaut called these the missing stories of South Asian adoption in 2025, and the phrase holds.
Here is what exists in English. I have included two Sri Lankan memoirs because this page says South Asian and means it.
Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion, by Nishta J. Mehra
Mehra is the daughter of Indian immigrants, raised in Memphis, married to a white woman, and mother to a Black child. Her memoir-in-essays is about the questions strangers ask that family in the grocery store and the questions she asks herself at night. Her father’s death runs underneath all of it. As far as I can find, it is the only memoir by a South Asian American adoptive parent from a trade publisher.
A Long Way Home, by Saroo Brierley
Brierley was five when he fell asleep on a train in Khandwa and woke up in Calcutta, nearly a thousand miles from a home he could not name. Adopted to Tasmania, he found his birth village twenty-five years later on Google Earth. You know this story as the film Lion. The book is plainer and better on the years in between, the ordinary Australian boyhood carried on top of a loss nobody could see.
From India with Love, by Latika Bourke
Bourke was eight months old when she left an orphanage in India for Bathurst, in country New South Wales, one of several children her parents adopted from India. She grew up to be a political journalist in Canberra and did not go back until she was thirty. The book is that trip, and the reckoning with a life spent not wanting to know.
Daughter of the Ganges, by Asha Miró
Miró was six when she left an orphanage in Nasik for Barcelona in 1974. She went back at twenty-seven, and again at thirty-five, and on the second trip found a sister. Written in Catalan, translated into English, and still the only South Asian title on most adoptee reading lists, which tells you how few there are.
Finding Your Way When Life Changes Your Plans, by V. Lakshmi
The nearest book on this list to an American memoir by an India-born adoptee. Lakshmi was born in a village in India, lost her mother two days later, and was adopted by a white Jewish family in the United States. Half the book is adoption. The other half is endometriosis, infertility, a failed adoption of her own, and a hysterectomy. Small press, plainly told. I list it because the shelf it belongs on is otherwise empty.
You’ll Always Be White to Me, by Garon Wade
Wade was left as a newborn in Colombo during the civil war and adopted by white American parents who moved him through South Africa, The Gambia, Jamaica, and Jordan, with stretches in Hawaii and Louisiana, before he landed in Texas for college. The title is a line someone said to him. He is a gay father now, and the book is about becoming one with a self assembled in six countries. Self-published.
The Adoption Cover Up of Sri Lanka, by Sanne van Rossen, with Maurice Ambaum
Van Rossen was adopted from Sri Lanka to the Netherlands in 1985. When she went searching for her mother, the papers did not match the woman. She kept pulling, and what came out was the baby-farm trade of the 1980s that the Dutch government eventually acknowledged. Written with Maurice Ambaum, first in Dutch. It changes the register of this list on purpose. Some searches end in a document, not a reunion.
Fiction, film, and the youngest readers. Mitali Perkins, a Bengali American novelist who adopted twin sons from India, wrote the story as a novel: Forward Me Back to You (2019), about a boy adopted from India as a baby who returns to Kolkata on a service trip. Reshma McClintock’s documentary Calcutta Is My Mother (2019) follows her first trip back to the city she left as an infant; she also runs Dear Adoption, where many of the essays this list is missing live. And Chaitra Wirta-Leiker, an India-born adoptee and psychologist in Colorado, writes the Adoptees Like Me picture books, which sit on my South Asian children’s list.
When this list runs out, InterCountry Adoptee Voices keeps the longest list of adoptee-written books from South Asia anywhere, most of them in Dutch, French, Swedish, or Spanish, waiting for translation.
By Adoptive Parents of Color
This shelf is short, and I would rather say so than pad it. Nishta Mehra’s Brown White Black, above, is the anchor. Here is the rest.
Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America, by Nefertiti Austin
Austin, a Black single woman in Los Angeles, adopted her son through the foster system and discovered that every book, every class, and every social worker assumed the adoptive mother was white and married. The memoir is her answer. Practical about the process, angry where anger is owed, and warm about the boy at the center of it.
Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family, by Erika Hayasaki
Not a parent’s memoir. Hayasaki, a journalist, follows identical twins born in Vietnam, one adopted by a wealthy white family in Illinois, one raised by an aunt in a village, until they meet as teenagers. I list it here for the parents: it is the best book I know on what the adults on both sides did not know, and on the money that runs under international adoption.
Lucky Girl, by Mei-Ling Hopgood
Hopgood was adopted from Taiwan by a white family in Michigan and grew up content, until a letter from her birth family arrived in her twenties and she learned she had been given up as the latest daughter in a house waiting for a son. An adoptee memoir, strictly, but it belongs with the parents: the ones who kept a girl, the ones who gave one away, and what each believed they were doing.
My Own Work on This Subject
The Smudged Hyphen: Essays on Family, Identity, and the Art of Belonging, by Lakshmi Iyer
Essays from sixteen years of raising children across color lines in a Tamil household in Pennsylvania: the open adoption, the birth family, the questions at the dinner table, the country that keeps asking where each of us is from. The adoption essays are about a third of the book. I wrote it because the shelf above this line had almost nothing on it by a mother like me.
For younger readers, Why Is My Hair Curly? follows Avantika, adopted into a Tamil family in Chennai, asking the questions the books above answer for adults. Why Is My Skin Brown? is about colorism, not adoption, and belongs next to it anyway. Both are on my South Asian children’s books list.
Common Questions
Are there adoption memoirs by Indian American or South Asian writers?
Yes, but few, and almost none from the United States. The best-known memoirs by India-born adoptees are Australian: Saroo Brierley’s A Long Way Home and Latika Bourke’s From India with Love. Asha Miró’s Daughter of the Ganges is Catalan. V. Lakshmi’s Finding Your Way When Life Changes Your Plans is a small-press memoir by an India-born adoptee raised in the United States. From the parent side, Nishta J. Mehra’s Brown White Black is the one trade memoir by a South Asian American adoptive mother, and Lakshmi Iyer’s essay collection The Smudged Hyphen is the other book on that shelf.
Which adoption memoirs are written by adoptees rather than adoptive parents?
Start with Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know, Angela Tucker’s You Should Be Grateful, and Jane Jeong Trenka’s The Language of Blood. Then Rebecca Carroll’s Surviving the White Gaze, Jenny Heijun Wills’s Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related., Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road, Susan Devan Harness’s Bitterroot, Sandy White Hawk’s A Child of the Indian Race, and Shannon Gibney’s The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be. Every one is by a transracial adoptee of color. Read them before anything written by an adoptive parent.
Are there adoption memoirs by Black, Asian, or Latino adoptive parents?
Very few. Nefertiti Austin’s Motherhood So White is the clearest example, a Black single mother’s account of adopting through foster care. Nishta J. Mehra’s Brown White Black is an Indian American mother’s memoir of raising a Black child. Most adoptive-parent memoirs in print are by white parents, which is why this list leads with adoptees and keeps the parents’ section short.
Does “Indian adoption memoir” mean India or Native American adoption?
Both, and search results mix them. On this page, Indian means India and the South Asian diaspora. Native American adoption, governed by the Indian Child Welfare Act, has its own literature. Susan Devan Harness’s Bitterroot and Sandy White Hawk’s A Child of the Indian Race are on this list because they are among the best adoption memoirs written, and because readers who searched for one meaning often needed the other. If the removal of Native children from their nations is what brought you here, the National Indian Child Welfare Association is the right door.
Who curates this list?
I am Lakshmi G. Iyer, a Tamil American author writing about transracial adoption, identity, and belonging. I have parented in an open transracial adoption since 2010. My essay collection The Smudged Hyphen is in the section above.
If you have a book I should add, especially one by an adoptee from India, write to me. I update this list a few times a year.
Further reading
Books About Transracial Adoption →
Indian American Adoptive Parent →
Desi Parents Adopting: What I Typed Into Google in 2009 →
Adoption Resources →