There is a photograph somewhere in the 155,000 I recently organized. Two small girls asleep in the back of our rented car in Las Cruces as we drove to Kohls for the first time as parents. This was 2010, and I was not yet sure what I had done.
I have been writing from that place ever since.
My name is Lakshmi Iyer. I’m a Tamil American essayist, memoirist, and author based in southeastern Pennsylvania. My essay collection The Smudged Hyphen was published in 2026.
There is also a documentary, Love Chaos Kin. It follows my family and Katherine Faye, the birth mother of my daughters. That film speaks in more than one voice.
What I write about, here and in the books: what it means to love people whose history you only partially hold. South Asian life in America. Motherhood as it actually arrives, not as promised. The hyphen that doesn’t bridge but smudges, and the work of building a life in that smudge anyway.
Where to Start
The archive runs to more than a thousand posts. These eight pages are the doorways in, the threads I keep returning to.
- Transracial Adoption & Parenting: adoption, openness, and the three mothers.
- Indian American Adoptive Parent: the brown mother’s side of transracial adoption.
- Indian American Identity: Tamil-American life and the hyphen that smudges.
- On Parenting: sixteen years of motherhood, in threads.
- On Education: the school year, and what an education is for.
- On Joy: K-drama, K-pop, and joy taken seriously.
- On Writing: the writing life, the craft, the road to a book.
- The Political Is Personal: elections, engagement, and joy as resistance.
Reading Paths
Three threads gathered into one continuous read, beginning to end.
- Watch Them Grow: a fourteen-year time-lapse of the children growing, read in order.
- Letters to My Daughters: fourteen letters, 2010 to 2024.
- COVID-19 Diaries: the real-time pandemic diary, forty-nine entries.
Resources
- Books About Transracial Adoption: a reading list fifteen years in the making, adoptee voices first.
- Adoption Resources: essays, books, and listening on transracial adoption, gathered in one place.
I also send a monthly letter from my desk. Not a list of announcements. It goes to people who want to read it.