BK (Kate) Jackson is an author, developmental editor, book coach, and a journalist with bylines in
HuffPost,
The Los Angeles Times,
The Sun,
Whale Road Review,
Hippocampus Magazine,
WIRED, and more. She earned a BA and an MA from UCLA. Jackson is the editor of the anthology
Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Family and the founder and editor of
Severance, a magazine and community for adoptees and individuals who’ve discovered misattributed parentage. She also has a Substack about writing with ADHD.
At Electric Lit Jackson tagged seven memoirs that take "readers deep into the mind-bending and sometimes shattering experience of discovering close family late in life." One title on the list:
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden
T Kira Madden’s memoir is a funny, fierce, and heartbreaking story of coming of age as a queer, biracial, glorious misfit in a complex family in 
Boca Raton, Florida. It’s impossible to pin down a theme because the book is—in the best of all possible ways—all over the place. It’s about addiction, acceptance, rejection, desire, privilege, trauma, violence, identity, and the families we’re born into and the families we choose. Her voice as a memoirist renders the narrator as indelible as the most memorable of fictional characters, and while her girlhood may not be remotely typical, it is universal in ways that will resonate with all readers. Like the narrators of each of these seven memoirs, Madden finds unexpected close family, in her case when a DNA test unspools her mother’s secrets. The revelation is the coda to her memoir, suggesting that families are like glaciers, with much remaining invisible and inaccessible deep below the surface.
Read about
the other entries on Jackson's list at Electric Lit.
--Marshal Zeringue
The Sun, Whale Road Review, Hippocampus Magazine, WIRED, and more. She earned a BA and an MA from UCLA. Jackson is the editor of the anthology Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Family and the founder and editor of Severance, a magazine and community for adoptees and individuals who’ve discovered misattributed parentage. She also has a Substack about writing with ADHD.
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