My Mother's Daughter

“Powerful…. Deeply researched and lyrically written…. A trenchant and moving memoir about adoption and systemic racism.” –Kirkus Starred Review

“A stirring family history… reckoning with race, power, privilege, and women’s roles… Clark-Flory writes movingly… the result is a well-researched, engaging narrative.” –Booklist Starred Review

“What a beautiful, immersive book. My Mother’s Daughter isn’t a mystery, but it reads a little like one, as Tracy Clark-Flory deftly peels back layer after layer of her own family’s story, laying bare much about this country’s history, as well as its relationship to sex, shame, women, race, and the durability of love itself. I cried!” –Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad and All the Single Ladies

“My Mother’s Daughter is a beautiful, complex narrative of how women have been held back and how we can change our futures. Reading this felt like sitting down with a dear friend, sorting through the sexual baggage we’ve been handed, and letting it go. This book is a myth-buster, a cycle-breaker, and it’s also a page turner. I was so fully immersed, I could not put it down.” –Lyz Lenz, New York Times bestselling author of God Land and Belabored
“A multidimensional and intimate analysis of gendered shame, My Mother’s Daughter deeply interrogates female sexual deviance across generational secrets and myths.” –Koa Beck, author of White Feminism
“A rich and deeply layered portrait of family and how we think about identity, memory, trauma, and love. This riveting story reveals how the past is never truly the past at all, but instead is constantly changing who we are with every uncovered truth and new conversation.” –Soraya Chemaly, author of All We Want Is Everything
“A searching, intimate, and powerful memoir about the bonds that shape us and the histories that hum beneath everyday life. My Mother’s Daughter moves with tenderness and moral clarity, asking how love, loss, and long-held secrets travel across generations. Tracy Clark-Flory has written a beautiful, haunting, and resonant book.” –Chelsea Bieker, bestselling author of Madwoman and Godshot
“A tender, revelatory, and deeply moving look at how family is shaped in the shadows of patriarchal power. Tracy probes her own history with curiosity and openness, expanding the possibilities of both grief and inheritance, even when they are touched by reproductive control. By unearthing her mother’s story, Tracy steps into the light and creates something altogether new. Defiant, transformative, and incredibly timely, this book will forever change how you understand motherhood, love, and the power of sisterhood.” –Amanda Montei, author of Touched Out
“Moving, trenchant, and deeply humane, My Mother’s Daughter is the tour de force of a memoir you need to read this year. I laughed, I cried, and I was instantly pulled in by this beautiful story of family, gender, race, searching, and belonging.” –Kate Manne, author of Down Girl and Unshrinking
“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. My Mother’s Daughter is the kind of book you can’t wait to talk about with your friends.” –Peggy Orenstein, New York Times bestselling author of Girls & Sex
“Tracy Clark-Flory has written a powerful, searching, and honest reckoning with the complicated inheritance mothers pass to daughters. Through investigating her own family’s very American story in all its pain and beauty, she interrogates the burdens of history while never losing sight of the individuals shaped by it. My Mother’s Daughter is clear-eyed, moving, and true.” – Irin Carmon, author of Unbearable and Notorious RBG
“Vivid, brave, and full of grace, My Mother’s Daughter is a deft, inspired examination of the love and mysteries between moms and their children. Tracy writes with characteristic self-awareness and a steady hand, guiding readers across continents and decades as she discovers, wrestles with, and finds both grief and joy in a family history that is shockingly common yet rarely told. Her story is haunting and satisfying. It is delicate and sacred–and as solid as a rock. It is also full of humor and sweetness. I will tell every mother and daughter I know to read this luminous, resonant bell of a book.” –Savala Nolan, author of Good Woman and Don’t Let it Get You Down

Tracy Clark-Flory is a journalist, essayist, and author of the memoir Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey into the Heart of Desire, an NPR Best Book of the Year.

She has written for Cosmopolitan, The Cut, ELLE, Esquire, Marie Claire, Glamour, The Guardian, The Washington Post, WIRED, Women’s Health, and many others. Previously, she was a senior staff writer at Jezebel and a staff writer at Salon.

She writes a weekly newsletter and cohosts Dire Straights, a feminist podcast critiquing hetero love, sex, politics, and culture.