The Color of Water by James McBride

The author is the very best kind of memoir writer--a writer well established in writing award winning fiction, who is writing about his mother well before she is actually dead. She is a white woman who is the child Polish Jews who is evasive with her children about both her race and her past. She lives in the black community because that is where she feels most at home, and has 12 children with 2 different men, choosing to remarry a black man after McBride's father, a black minister, dies before he is born of cancer. She has a multiply traumatic past, with prejudice and the Holocaust in the near past, and sexual abuse by her father fueling her escape from her family of origin. She is fierce and complicated, and as McBride unpeels the layers of who she is, there is much to be amazed by. It is a loving tribute that inherently explores race and parenthood, opportunity and choices, and what it means to him to be both black and Jewish. The author notes in the reprint that by writing this, which it appears he did with the aid of his mother, but perhaps without the permission of his siblings, at least at first, that talking about family is not only complicated but it can stir intense feelings in others.