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Belonging : a daughter's search for identity through love and loss
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2023
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Summary

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"[An] outstanding debut."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The award-winning journalist and co-host of CBS Saturday Morning tells the candid, and deeply personal story of her mother's abandonment and how the search for answers forced her to reckon with her own identity and the secrets that shaped her family for five decades.

Though Michelle Miller was an award-winning broadcast journalist for CBS News, few people in her life knew the painful secret she carried: her mother had abandoned her at birth. Los Angeles in 1967 was deeply segregated, and her mother--a Chicana hospital administrator who presented as white, had kept her affair with Michelle's father, Dr. Ross Miller, a married trauma surgeon and Compton's first Black city councilman--hidden, along with the unplanned pregnancy. Raised largely by her father and her paternal grandmother, Michelle had no knowledge of the woman whose genes she shared. Then, fate intervened when Michelle was twenty-two. As her father lay stricken with cancer, he told her, "Go and find your mother."

Belonging is the chronicle of Michelle's decades-long quest to connect with the woman who gave her life, to confront her past, and ultimately, to find her voice as a journalist, a wife, and a mother. Michelle traces the years spent trying to make sense of her mixed-race heritage and her place in white-dominated world. From the wealthy white schools where she was bussed to integrate, to the newsrooms filled with white, largely male faces, she revisits the emotional turmoil of her formative years and how the enigma of her mother and her rejection shaped Michelle's understanding of herself and her own Blackness.

As she charts her personal journey, Michelle looks back on her decades on the ground reporting painful events, from the beating of Rodney King to the death of George Floyd, revealing how her struggle to understand her racial identity coincides with the nation's own ongoing and imperfect racial reckoning. What emerges is an intimate family story about secrets--secrets we keep, secrets we share, and the secrets that make us who we are.

Trade Reviews
Publishers Weekly Review
CBS Saturday Morning host Miller chronicles the search for her estranged birth mother in her outstanding debut. When Miller was 24, her dying father--a Black trauma surgeon--urged her to find her white Chicana mom. As a child, Miller was raised by her grandmother and a handful of other women, and she longed for a connection to her biological mother: "Why is the light pigment of my skin or the too-loose texture of my hair, physical attributes not of my choosing, bestowed upon me at birth by a woman whose face I couldn't even conjure?" Later, she sought out half-siblings and other formerly unknown relatives to help piece together a picture of her own identity, ultimately finding her mother and uncovering the reason for her mother's departure. Miller poignantly weaves her story with key historical moments, including the Rodney King beating--she lived a few blocks away in Compton at the time--and the fact that her father was the first doctor to treat Bobby Kennedy after he was shot. Readers will be transfixed by Miller's thought-provoking queries about race and family, and inspired by her candor. The result is an elegantly structured soul-soother. Agent: Will Lippincott, Aevitas Creative Management. (Mar.)
Booklist Review
When journalist Miller, co-host of CBS Saturday Morning, was born, her father was married to a woman who wasn't her mother. Her parents met at the hospital where they both worked, he as a surgeon and she as a nurse. Miller's Mexican-American mother never told her family that she was pregnant, and after giving birth, left the author with her Black father, who asked his own mother to raise the baby. Miller grew up surrounded by love and maternal figures, but always wondered about the mother who had left her. This memoir chronicles Miller's life as an inquisitive child growing up in Los Angeles. Her experiences with racism and colorism from a young age shaped her identity. After she graduated from Howard University, she determined to make a career in reporting and broadcast journalism. In her twenties, Miller learned her father had cancer, and he urged her to find her mother, if only to understand the other half of her medical history. Miller's recounting makes for a thoughtful meditation on family and identity.
Kirkus Review
The co-host of CBS Saturday Morning recounts the quest for her biological mother. Miller's father was a successful surgeon who, even in supposedly progressive Los Angeles, encountered a color line that prompted him to political activism. As the author writes, she was "the child of a clandestine affair," and her father was reticent to reveal to her the identity of her mother, who was clearly not Black. "If I wore my hair blow-dried straight," Miller writes, "people queried whether I was Italian, Jewish, or Hispanic, peppering me with questions about my heritage long before I had examined such questions for myself." Among the Southern relatives with whom she lived, her mixed-race status was acknowledged, if quietly. However, no details were forthcoming until her gravely ill father suggested that she find her mother to answer the questions he knew his daughter harbored. One, of course, is why her mother abandoned them. Enter the color line again and the manifold prejudices of the era. Those color lines were still in play, writes Miller, when a classmate and crush, shocked to find out that she was Black, shunned her afterward. Unlike many such memoirs, the author refuses to wallow in self-pity. Instead, she is determined to claim her heritage and honor it. Unfortunately, her mother continued to distance herself, at which point Miller resolved, "no longer would I accord her half of my identity, when she had given me nothing of hers." That view gained further nuance as Miller grew to middle age and deeper wisdom. Though the author prepared a special TV segment in the hope that her mother would finally "publicly acknowledge the Black child she had borne," she understands that it will likely remain unrealized in a time when the color line still holds strong. An affecting narrative that explores race and racism while addressing deeply personal questions. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
First Word1
Part 1Mother Figures7
1Original Sin9
2Bigmama's House21
3After the Fall31
4Xernona and Me41
5The Colors of Us55
6The Woman in Blue62
7Girl on the Bus71
8Our Matriarch81
9Shape Shifting88
10Naming and Claiming102
Part 2Chasing the Dream117
11The Mecca119
12African Spring135
13The Rookie149
14Global Citizen162
15Orange County News169
16My Mother, Reprise176
Part 3The Way Home189
17Crashing191
18Boy Wonder202
19True North221
20Love and Politics234
21Motherhood244
22What Care Forgot252
23American History259
24The Mouth of Babes273
25A Reckoning280
Acknowledgments293
About the Author301
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