Almost BrownAlmost Brown

A memoir about a dysfunctional, biracial, globe-trotting family and their reckoning with ethnicity and belonging. Charlotte Gill's father is Indian. Her mother is English. And although they couldn't be more different, they meet in 1960's London when, despite the prevailing image of free love, the world was not ready for interracial love. Their union, a revolutionary act, results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Along the way, they venture from the United Kingdom to Canada and to the United States in elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness--a pursuit that eventually tears them apart. Almost Brown is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving parents of two different races and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it's lived between race checkboxes. Eventually, her parents drift apart because they just aren't compatible. Charlotte distances herself from her larger-than-life father too, resulting in 20 years of silence--and, eventually, a complicated reunion. Gill examines the messiness of family while looking for answers to the question, What are you? Almost Brown is both a deeply personal memoir and an excavation into ethnicity, ancestry, "diversity," and the idea of "race"--a historical concept that still informs our beliefs today--and its impact on her own mixed race family.