Some families are made by biology. Some by paperwork. Some by the daily accumulation of ordinary love.
In these twenty-one essays, Lakshmi Iyer traces the arc of one such family, from years of infertility and failed adoptions, to the Thursday night phone call that changed everything, to the joy and complexity of raising white children as a brown mother in America.
Moving through questions of identity, race, immigration, and what it means to belong to a family the world cannot easily read, The Smudged Hyphen is written with candor and tenderness. These are essays about the life that forms at the hyphen: between cultures, between families, between the self we show the world and the one we keep for ourselves.
A book for anyone who has ever had to explain their family. Or chosen not to.
What It’s About
The essays in this collection were written across ten years, on Women’s Web, Mutha Magazine, Adoptive Families, and Substack. They orbit seven territories: marriage, the wanting years, adoption, raising daughters who look nothing like me, the writing life, what we are made of, and womanhood as an ongoing project.
The title comes from something in the prologue: about how the children smudge the hyphen a little, melding identities that were never supposed to go together.
The family at the center of this book is also the subject of Love Chaos Kin, a feature documentary by Chithra Jeyaram that premiered at CAAMFest 2025.
Also by Lakshmi Iyer
Hindsight · A Star Keeps Its Distance · Why Is My Hair Curly?