The Constant Revisions of T Kira Madden

But T Kira Madden in her gorgeous new memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, about her life growing up too quickly as a biracial queer teen in Florida with addict parents who she loves fiercely, fully owns and grapples with her past, her future and the past lives of her beloved mother and father where she writes through addiction, adoption and sexuality. And that was a wonderful thing to really explore my parents and the people in the book in a fully dimensional way to map out our relationship as a whole instead of just isolated incidents or stories you might tell at the dinner table.In the back of half of the book you have a reconstruction of your mom’s life growing up. I’m glad that resonated because that’s what the book is about to me is those individual experiences and the constant revisions.In a way it feels like you’ve lived so many different lives and the same thing with the section about your mother. That was important to me examining what that looks like and the friction and electricity that can happen between those different selves in different minds and different languages even.Did exploring the many different lives of your parents make you feel like closer to them in some way? As much as I wished the book was more front loaded with queer material, I actually liked the way it slowly comes out, but we have these shadow markers throughout the book because that’s how it felt in real life coming out later in my twenties. We have when I’m seeing two women kiss for the first time, the Taylor Hanson thing, and those friendships have me thinking about what does it mean that I can kiss someone whenever I want and it’s this person.