The Breaks

Starred review from June 28, 2021
In a kind of spiritual successor to the genre-defying No Archive Will Restore You, Singh, an associate professor of English and gender studies, reveals the most intimate details of her life and politics. Using the form of a letter to her daughter, Singh offers “alternative histories... of those who have faced annihilation and lived toward survival” in the face of Western capitalism’s “wholesale destruction of the earth,” and criticizes the “dominant narratives” that have shaped mainstream culture—such as Disney’s painting of Indigenous peoples as “savage” and the white man as “fundamentally good” in the movie Pocahontas. To go “against the grain” of these racist depictions, Singh recalls her youth fighting discriminatory aggression as a mixed “Brown” child in the “purportedly multicultural Canada of the 1980s,” her lifelong endurance of bodily and medical trauma, and the home she’s created with her partner—as “queer collaborators” who play “with what constitutes family.” Singh has a tendency to wax academic, but that doesn’t detract from the beauty of her insights as she exquisitely links theory and poetics to her own fears, insecurities, and certainty that one day her child will need to break away from her. This is a stunning work. Agent: Tanya McKinnon, McKinnon Literary.

July 15, 2021
In this epistolary memoir, a queer, biracial scholar writes to her daughter about what it's like "to mother at the end of the world." Born in Canada to a Punjabi immigrant father and a White mother, Singh, a professor of English and women's, gender, and sexuality studies, simultaneously celebrates her child's ability to embrace her own "Brownness" and decries the "whitewashed" education she receives in the American public school system. Recalling her daughter's drawing of a Thanksgiving scene, she writes, "I admired the craft of your book, a swell of parental pride coursing through me as I witnessed the evidence of my progeny doing and making things in the world beyond me. And I relished that you had colored all four children brown like you." The author recalls meeting her Punjabi relatives in India much later in life, a trip that helped solidify her understanding of her racial and ethnic identity and also forced her to reckon with the historical, inherited violence that she feels led to her father's abusive tendencies. In addition to her ethnic awakening, Singh describes coming into her queerness and, subsequently, building a queer parenting relationship with Nathan, the biological father of her child. For Singh, a key part of this journey was reconciling with Nathan's Whiteness and her own desire, as a child, to be White. By the end of the book, the author appears confident in their unconventional partnership and living situation--she and Nathan now co-parent in a duplex that she describes as a "queer collective"--and her ability to parent through patriarchy and White supremacy. Singh's clarity of thought, vulnerability, and passion for social justice all render this well-structured essay a pleasure to read. Although she writes exclusively about her specific experience of queer parenting, her anxieties, fears, and triumphs will resonate with parents of all identities and backgrounds. The book's only weaknesses are some of the transitions into second person, which occasionally distract from the otherwise sharply honed prose. A well-argued book-length essay about queer, multiracial parenting.

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