Stranger in My Own Story

About this book

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.