Surviving the White Gaze

Everything changed when she met her birth mother, a young white woman, who consistently undermined Carroll’s sense of her blackness and self-esteem. Carroll’s childhood became harrowing, and her memoir explores the tension between the aching desire for her birth mother’s acceptance, the loyalty she feels toward her adoptive parents, and the search for her racial identity. As an adult, Carroll forged a path from city to city, struggling along the way with difficult boyfriends, depression, eating disorders, and excessive drinking. Ultimately, through the support of her chosen black family, she was able to heal.

“Intimate and illuminating, Surviving the White Gaze is a timely examination of racism and racial identity in America today, A moving narrative… Carroll’s memoir is intelligent, melancholic, and searching. She reveals that just past survival, it is possible to find peace, and joy.” — Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

“Carroll shows, page after page, how the journey to, and through, survival, necessitates unrelenting interrogation of the nation’s cauldron of innocence. Carroll has crafted a book as textured, layered and effective as any memoir penned in the 21st century.” — Kiese Laymon, bestselling author of Heavy: An American Memoir

“In this moving and sobering book, Rebecca Carroll has extraordinary retrospective wisdom. It is a profound study of identity published as the world struggles with the nature of justice, a deeply important book for our time.” — Andrew Solomon, the bestselling author of Far from the Tree

“Rebecca Carroll has devoted her life to sharing, developing, and amplifying our stories–and our story. And in Surviving the White Gaze she tells us hers with the same rigor, the same verve, and the same radical vulnerability that reminds us why we’re lucky to have her.” — Damon Young, bestselling author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blackerand an extraordinarily moving portrait of resilience.