Bittersweet - by Harrison Mooney (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From the author of the award-winning Invisible Boy comes a wryly funny and keenly devastating memoir of race, abandonment, family, and grief--how they shape our sense of belonging and love, and how childhood trauma reverberates into adulthood.

Harrison Mooney, a Black adoptee raised in a white, ultra-religious, evangelical family, learned growing up that in order to be loved he had to suppress any interest in his birth mother and Black culture. At twenty-five, after a devastating break with his adoptive mother, Harrison meets his biological mother, Nana, for the first time in a downtown café. In her face, he recognizes his own and his understanding of himself and his Blackness is forever reshaped. But reunion with the mother who relinquished him is not that simple. Overwhelmed by this powerful kinship and numbed by years of emotional distance from his adoptive family, he pulls away.

Bittersweet traces the long, looping path that brings him back. In the years between their meetings, Harrison navigates complicated relationships with a tangle of mothers--his postpartum wife, her dying mom, his increasingly distant adoptive mother, and the birth mother who has loved him fiercely from afar--and is forced to confront what real care looks like. When he and Nana finally begin to reunite, with late-night phone calls, shared jokes, and the small, miraculous recognitions of genetics, Harrison discovers how much he has needed her all along. But just as their reunion appears to be working out, Mooney makes a tragic discovery--Nana is dying and has no plans to seek treatment.

A propulsive, sharply observed, and wryly funny--even at its darkest--exploration of a life fractured between two maternal figures and a buried longing for real connection. Bittersweet is an unforgettable memoir of a young man finding and losing his mother--and learning, against all odds, how to be a son.

About the Author

Harrison Mooney is a memoirist, journalist, public speaker, educator, and activist. The son of a Ghanaian immigrant mother, he was adopted at birth by a white, fundamentalist Christian family and raised in the Bible belt. Harrison's debut memoir, Invisible Boy, which traces his childhood journey "from white cult to Black consciousness," was the winner of the 2023 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and was shortlisted for two BC and Yukon Book Prizes, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Governor-General's Literary Award for English Nonfiction. Harrison's work has also appeared in The National Post, The Guardian, The Tyee, and Maclean's. He lives in East Vancouver with his family.