My book is here!

Along with some excerpts, essays, and interviews—and I could use your help launching it into the world.

Me and my sister Kathy with the book.

It’s pub day! My book, My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past, is officially out in the world today! I have a few quick ways for you to support me and this book:

• Order a copy, if you haven’t already!

• Come to my launch tonight in Berkeley if you’re in the Bay Area (and be sure to RSVP). A book launch is like a wedding meets baby shower—it would mean so much to see you there. Or show up to one of my upcoming events in Brooklyn, San Francisco, or Los Angeles (and be sure to RSVP for those too!).

• Tell people about my book today on social media by sharing a photo of it and/or linking out to my recent Modern Love podcast episode, Guardian excerpt, Cosmopolitan essay, Live with Ellie Anderson, or interview with Stefanie O'Connell. Or order a copy for a friend or forward this email to someone who needs it!

• If you love it, give it 5-stars on Goodreads and on Amazon—it takes just a few seconds and is a huge help for getting other people to read it.

If you haven’t been following along: my book is about how a DNA test connected me with my sister Kathy, who my mom placed for adoption at a home for unwed mothers in the sixties, twenty years before I was born. I set out to understand what had happened back in 1965 and learned that our mom was one of over a million women who in the pre-Roe era were sent away and coerced into adoption.

She was pulled into a racist and sexist system designed to turn “bad girls” into proper women, wives, and mothers. It was meant to control women’s sexuality, promote marriage, and bolster the white nuclear-family norm.

I realized that my own life had been profoundly shaped by my mom’s past, but I also stumbled on a bigger story about shame, family secrets, race, and everything that we inherit from our mothers in a world that hates them. New York Times bestselling author Peggy Orenstein puts it like so:

“Tracy Clark-Flory connects the dots between her own life, the reader’s, and the larger culture, turning the family story of a pregnant girl caught by the social forces of her time—around gender, race, class—into the story of all women: who we are as daughters, how we carry the relationships to our mothers long after they are gone, and how we are shaped, generationally, by the limits on our personal, sexual, and reproductive freedom.”

It’s gotten starred reviews from both Kirkus (“deeply researched, lyrically written,” “trenchant and moving,” and “a powerful rejection of white-male dominated systems of oppression”) and Booklist (”a stirring family history... reckoning with race, power, privilege, and women’s roles”).

The book has also gotten praise from Rebecca Traister (”beautiful, immersive”), Soraya Chemaly (”rich and deeply layered”), Savala Nolan (”vivid, brave, and full of grace”), Chelsea Bieker (”haunting and resonant”), lyz Lenz (”a myth-buster, a cycle-breaker”), Kate Manne (”the tour de force of a memoir you need to read this year”), Koa Beck (”multidimensional and intimate”), Amanda Montei (”tender, revelatory, and deeply moving”), and Irin Carmon (”a powerful, searching, and honest reckoning”).

I appreciate your support so much—and hope to see you tonight or in the coming days! You can expect some behind-the-scenes reports from book tour in the coming weeks.