Real American: Becoming Whole | Julie Lythcott-Haims (SVWC 2019)

JULIE LYTHCOTT-HAIMS’ first book, How to Raise an Adult, took on the harm of helicopter parenting and turned her into a prominent cultural commentator. Now, in Real American, a luminous memoir that is both poetic and piercing (and sometimes funny), she writes about her struggles with identity and race, laying bare her own wounds and the wounds of the country. The beloved, high-achieving child of a white mother and a black father, she fought to find her place, not sure where she belonged. From her efforts to tame her hair to her conflicted feelings about the skin color of her own children, she writes about race in a wholly original and nuanced way, enumerating the slights that accrue even in an outwardly blessed life like hers. Her self-acceptance is hard-won-and thrilling-and she tells us how she finally achieved it.
--
Welcome to the Sun Valley Writers' Conference RUclips channel. Subscribe for talks, conversations, and discussions from some of the most inspired minds in the writing world.
The mission of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference is to invite readers and writers into a realm of intellectual intimacy. Anchored by recognized authors of fiction and nonfiction, readers and writers come together as a community to be educated, enlightened, challenged, and inspired . . . looking at the world through a literary lens.