Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery

by Harrison Mooney

Overview

FINALIST - Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction

WINNER - 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writers Prizes for Nonfiction

FINALIST - Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction

An unforgettable coming-of-age memoir about a Black boy adopted into a white, Christian fundamentalist family

Perfect for fans of Educated, Punch Me Up to the Gods, and Surviving the White Gaze

“An affecting portrait of life inside the twin prisons of racism and unbending orthodoxy.”  --Kirkus Reviews

A powerful, experiential journey from white cult to Black consciousness: Harrison Mooney’s riveting story of self-discovery lifts the curtain on the trauma of transracial adoption and the internalized antiblackness at the heart of the white evangelical Christian movement.

Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man the same way Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me was inspired by James Baldwin, Harrison Mooney’s debut memoir will captivate readers with his powerful gift for storytelling, his keen eye for insight and observation, and his wry sense of humor.

As an adopted and homeschooled Black boy with ADHD at white fundamentalist Christian churches and tent revivals, Mooney was raised amid a swirl of conflicting and confusing messages and beliefs. Within that radical and racist right-wing bubble along the U.S. border in Canada's Bible Belt, Harrison was desperate to belong and to be "visible" to those around him.

But before ultimately finding his own path, Harrison must first come to understand that the forces at work in his life were not supernatural, but the same trauma and systemic violence that has terrorized Black families for generations. Reconnecting with his birth mother--and understanding her journey--leads Harrison to a new connection with himself: the eyes looking down were my true mother’s eyes, and the face was my true mother’s face, and for the first time in my life, I saw that I was beautiful.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781586423476
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	09/20/2022
Series:	Truth to Power: Eyewitness Memoirs
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Harrison Mooney is an award-winning writer and journalist from Vancouver. Prior to penning his debut memoir, Harrison worked for The Vancouver Sun for nearly a decade as a reporter, editor and columnist. His writing has also appeared in the National Post, Yahoo, The Guardian, and Macleans. He lives in East Vancouver with his family.
 

 

Table of Contents

Author's Note xv

Part I The Irrational

1 Circus (or The Boy Who Wore a Very Loud Hat) 3

2 Superbook (or The Boy as He Floated Away) 25

3 Gateway (or The Boy Whose Crown Was Worthless) 55

4 Ham (or The Boy Responsible for the Racket Coming In) 85

Part II The Path

5 Camp (or The Boy Who Ruined The Kid for Everybody) 117

6 How Do You Do? (or The Boy inside the Echo) 150

7 People Can Tell (or The Boy Could Be a River) 184

Part III Invisible to Whom?

8 Burden Bearers (or The Boy Storming Upstairs) 221

9 He's Back Now (or The Boy Who Loved His Captors) 248

10 The Boy Who Saw What Wasn't There 277

Selected Bibliography 309

Discussion Questions 321

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A harrowing account of a childhood spent wrestling with big questions while an adoptive family offers all the wrong answers. I couldn’t get enough of young Harrison Mooney’s determination to understand racism and the casually cruel ideas that animated his reactionary religious upbringing. Invisible Boy cuts deep with just-in-time insights about faith, family, and coming of age in a deeply flawed world.”
—Sarah Berman, author of Don’t Call It a Cult

Editorial Reviews

One of Daily Hive's "12 hot-off-the-press books we recommend reading this September"

“Invisible Boy is told with a vibrancy unique to the author. Mooney’s generosity of spirit, his sense of humour and capacity to transcend the self creates a book that is as riveting as it is incendiary.”
—The Tyee

“An affecting portrait of life inside the twin prisons of racism and unbending orthodoxy.”
—Kirkus Reviews

"A stark and startling memoir, Mooney's vital story depicts the violence of transracial adoption in the all-too-frequent cases where white parents simply decline to engage with the realities facing their non-white children."
—Booklist

“Invisible Boy is a touching memoir about heritage, religion, and race.”
—Foreword Reviews

“A harrowing account of a childhood spent wrestling with big questions while an adoptive family offers all the wrong answers. I couldn’t get enough of young Harrison Mooney’s determination to understand racism and the casually cruel ideas that animated his reactionary religious upbringing. Invisible Boy cuts deep with just-in-time insights about faith, family, and coming of age in a deeply flawed world.”
—Sarah Berman, author of Don’t Call It a Cult

From the Publisher

2022-08-11
A debut memoir recounts a scarifying childhood as the adoptive son of White religious fundamentalists.

“We give them Black children to raise, like they’re flowers in a vase, and perhaps that’s what they think of us,” writes former Vancouver Sun reporter and editor Mooney toward the end of the book. “Well, think again. Lovely as they look inside your living room, the flowers are dying.” Soul death came in the form of a studied denial of any possibility of exploring Blackness. As Mooney, the biological child of a Ghanaian mother and a German father, details, in the remote wilderness community in which he was raised by adoptive White parents, there simply were no Black people like him, no books about the Black experience, and no access to appropriate education or media. As a progressively unwilling devotee of a certain kind of religious understanding, he found role models in the Bible among those sold into slavery and oppressed by authority: Joseph, Moses, and Samson, “whose hair was a total mystery to everyone and impossible to manage. Needless to say, no one knew what to do with my hair either.” Entering college and leaving a household headed by a man of sour disposition and a surpassingly mean-spirited woman—“father” and “mother” increasingly failed to remain appropriate designations—Mooney eventually replaced a religion marked by suspicions that demons were all around with a more secular one whose texts included the songs of Nina Simone (“I was using her to signify a Blackness that I didn’t really feel”) and the writings of James Baldwin, who, “like me, was a child of church.” Having become racially conscious through that education, Mooney is highly sensitive to systemic racism—which is practiced, he wisely notes, by people who are “as brainwashed as anyone, mindlessly minding their homes in a slave state.”

An affecting portrait of life inside the twin prisons of racism and unbending orthodoxy.

Kirkus Reviews