Tracy Clark-Flory and I both grew up as only children. We weren't.

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Growing up as an only child in Berkeley, Tracy Clark-Flory didn’t just dream of having a sibling, she believed in her. “I lay in bed at night as a kid and concocted a story about a secret sister that my parents were keeping down the hall from me,” she recalls, “and I would hold my breath in hopes of being able to hear her breathing.” She was further away than down the hall, but a few decades later, Tracy found her.

As she writes in her masterful My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past, as a teenager in 1965, Tracy’s mother had a relationship with a Nigerian student, became pregnant, and was sent away to a home for unwed mothers. Tracy only learned of the existence of her sister when she was a teenager herself, and after her mother’s death, decided to see if she could find her — and to learn what her mother had gone through. “I came to understand that she didn’t have what I would call a choice at all,” she says. “ The truth of what those homes were is so horrifying, if you’re actually forced to say what it was, it makes it impossible to ignore.”

For everyone who reads My Mother’s Daughter, it’s a story about shame and systemic racism, and also of hope, discovery, and connection. It’s a tale of what is possible when we engage in the process of dropping the baggage of generational oppression, beautifully told. For me, it’s been something even more.

The moment I heard about Tracy’s new memoir (Her first book Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey into the Heart of Desire is not to be missed), I couldn’t wait to read it. I’ll read anything that Tracy, my friend and colleague of several years, has to say. But this story had a particular allure. Like Tracy, I had grown up as an only child — in my case, with a single mother who’d endured the shame of getting pregnant out of wedlock in the 1960’s. Then, in 2023, I learned that when I was three years old, my mother became pregnant again — and gave up the sister I never knew for adoption.

As Tracy and I talk about in this truly special episode of Patient, the difficult choices that our mothers had to make impacted them for the rest of their lives, and they in turn impacted us, our sisters, and our own children. It’s a conversation unlike any I have ever had with anyone else, and I’m so grateful to Tracy for it.

Our searches for our sisters could not have turned out more differently, but Tracy has articulated something that I imagine entire generations of young women who were sent away must have experienced. “ She was being asked to pretend that this monumental event, both physically and emotionally, had not happened to her,” she says. “I think that inevitably, every time that my mom looked at me, every birthday, Mother’s Day, that my sister was there for her too. She was very clear to me that she thought of her first daughter every day of her life.”

Check out the full conversation for Tracy’s insights into how the tactics for controlling women from the past have come roaring back since Dobbs, and the beautiful things that can come out of releasing our family secrets. “This is brand new to me, having a sister,” she says. “ It is tremendous, and it feels like a huge gift. What else can I do but embrace it and take the lesson that life can surprise you?”

You can watch our conversation below, or if you prefer, listen to a gently edited version above or on your favorite podcast platform. Please do like and subscribe if you are so moved; it really all helps.

Show notes:

Get to know Tracy and her work better on her site. And you can work with her on your own writing via her coaching service.

Order My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past and Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey into the Heart of Desire from bookshop.org or any of your favorite booksellers.

You can get a double shot of Tracy here on Substack via TCF Emails and Dire Straights, the impeccably named podcast she does with Amanda Montei.

For more insight into her memoir writing process, check out her interview on Memoir Land.

If you’re curious to learn more about the era of homes for unwed mothers, check out Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade.

You can read the Heritage Foundation’s report on “Saving America by Saving the Family” to get a sense of where we’re going with America’s vision for women’s reproductive autonomy.

If you’d like to be a guest or have a suggestion for the show, let me know! I’d love to talk.