Some families are made by biology. Some by paperwork. Some by the daily accumulation of ordinary love.
In these twenty-one essays, Lakshmi Iyer traces the arc of one such family — from years of infertility and failed adoptions, to the Thursday night phone call that changed everything, to the particular joy and complexity of raising white children as a brown mother in America.
Written with candour and tenderness, The Smudged Hyphen is about identity, belonging, and the art of loving a family the world keeps trying to explain.
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Lakshmi Iyer
Some questions follow you. For Lakshmi Iyer, they have always been the ones about belonging — where it comes from, how it’s made, whether it can be chosen.
Lakshmi writes Belonging, Mostly, a newsletter of essays at the intersection of adoption, Indian-American identity, and the stories we tell ourselves about family, culture, and home. Her writing moves between the personal and the political, the intimate and the expansive — tracing the fault lines of diaspora, the tender complications of adoptive motherhood, and what it means to raise children who are becoming themselves in a world that doesn’t always know what to make of them.
When she is not writing, she is watching the sky, losing herself in Korean and Chinese dramas, and being quietly astonished by her kids.
