SKINFOLK: A Memoir, by Matthew Pratt Guterl
I will, as far as I know, occur once. This thing I call “Chloé” is singular; it lives once, dies once. But I am also born into a body, a time, a class and a place, and those biographical facts carry sociopolitical meaning that precedes me. I cannot be fully explained by historical signifiers, but I’m never free of them either. To be alive is to grapple with these two truths, to struggle at the intersection of self and society, interiority and exteriority, individuality and environment.
The work of accepting this is inelegant and often challenging. But literature is here to help. Through depicting how real and imagined individuals have met their larger historical moment, a great narrative can expand my capacity to meet my own. This requires an author who can deftly render both the complexity of the social world and the specificity of a character making their way through it. Matthew Pratt Guterl’s ambitious, intellectually searching memoir, “Skinfolk” — which chronicles his life growing up in a multiracial, partially adopted family in suburban New Jersey — has the potential to achieve this expansive effect but falls short as it keeps its subjects at arm’s length.
Born in 1970, Guterl, a professor of Africana and American studies at Brown University, is the first of two white, biological children born to Bob and Sheryl, a handsome, idealistic couple whose dreams of a large family lead them to international adoption. In 1972, Bug is adopted from Korea. Mark, a second white biological child, is born in 1973. Bear — born in Saigon to a Vietnamese mother and an African American G.I. father — arrives in 1975. Anna, half-Korean, half-white, is 13 when adopted from Seoul in 1977. Last comes 6-year-old Eddie, Black and from the South Bronx, adopted in 1983.
We are told in the preface not to expect a dystopian narrative of family abuse and trauma. Bob and Sheryl provide well for their children, adoring, supporting and celebrating them. The kids’ childhoods are filled with family dinners, lake vacations, Sunday afternoons spent hand-washing “the fleet” of cars in their driveway. But the world and its dangers loom.
