Sign-In
Cart
Stranger in My Own Story: A Memoir
Hardcover
Biographies GeneralPregnancy & Adoption
Publisher Price: $28.00
ISBN13: 9781558969834
Publisher: Skinner House Books
Published: Oct 6 2026
Pages: 312
Weight: 1.10
Height: 1.20 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
A raw and profound debut that chronicles coming of age as a transracial adoptee. A necessary addition to the modern canon of literary memoirs that explore race, identity, and belonging.
Erik Mohn was raised to believe that love was enough. America taught him otherwise. Born to a Black mother he never knew and adopted by a white family in small-town Massachusetts, Mohn grew up cherished yet unprepared for what his skin would mean in the world.
Stranger in My Own Story traces Mohn's coming of age as he searches not just for identity but for language--words for grief, for anger, for belonging, for the silence left by a mother he lost and a father he could never quite reach. He pieces together meaning from what's available and hip-hop becomes his first mirror and his first vocabulary--a survival guide passed through speakers and headphones.
As the cost of his cultural displacement begins to surface, Mohn is forced to confront the wounds he's been carrying. Those reckonings come to a head at Howard University--The Mecca--where the self he assembled in isolation is tested in community, challenged in relationship, and slowly transformed.
Written with the lyrical pulse of hip-hop and a moral clarity forged in lived experience, Stranger in My Own Story is an intimate memoir of transracial adoption and a universal story about what it costs to grow up without a mirror--and what it takes to build one anyway. Mohn's story mirrors the nation's: unfinished, fragile, and still reaching toward wholeness.
Also in
Biographies General
Bluesland: Portraits of Thirteen Major American Blues Masters
Pete Welding (ED.)
Toby Byron (ED.)
Hardcover
Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna
Hacohen, Malachi Haim
Hardcover
The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 Bc0-400 AD
Freeman, Charles
Hardcover
Make It a Double: From Wretched to Wondrous: Tales of One Woman's Lifelong Discovery of Whisky
Sackier, Shelley
Hardcover
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
Isaacson, Walter
Hardcover
An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents Over Three Centuries
Correia, David
Hardcover
Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s
Howe, Sean
Hardcover
Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
Cooper, Christian
Hardcover
The Secret Life of the Savoy: Glamour and Intrigue at the World's Most Famous Hotel
Williams, Olivia
Paperback
The Badger: The Life of Bernard Hinault and the Legacy of French Cycling
Fotheringham, William
Paperback
Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Womens Political Culture, 1830-1900
Sklar, Kathryn Kish
Paperback
The Devil's Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich
Kinney, David
Wittman, Robert K.
Paperback
Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors' Wives
Cordingly, David
Paperback
Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Paperback
The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy: A Family Memoir of Scandal and Greed in the Meat Industry
Cherington, Gretchen
Paperback
My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love
Dessa Wander
Hardcover
Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
Giuffre, Virginia Roberts
Hardcover
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself
Lawson, Jenny
Hardcover
Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor
Kuehn, Christine
Hardcover
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
Dohrn, Zayd Ayers
Hardcover
A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
Fedarko, Kevin
Paperback
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
Colloff, Pamela
Hardcover