INTERVIEW: Shannon Luders-Manuel, Author of The One Who Loves You

Interviewed by Michèle Dawson Haber

It was a joy and an inspiration to talk with debut author Shannon Luders-Manuel about her memoir, The One Who Loves You: A Memoir of Growing Up Biracial in a Black and White World (Lawrence Hill Books, February 2025).

The joy came from reading how she grew from being a confused young girl who felt there was no place she truly belonged in a divided world to a young woman who pulled off all the labels affixed by others and learned to define herself.

Shannon’s story is unlike any other I’ve read. Born to a Black father and a white mother who separated when she was three, Shannon is raised by her white extended family and sees her elusive and charismatic father sporadically, often feeling let down by him. Feeling like an outsider in nearly every environment she enters, Shannon’s teen and young adult years are spent yearning to connect with her loving, but absent father and for a place to belong. She finds acceptance in the Baptist religion and becomes a born-again Christian at age fourteen. Eventually, the church and its dictates will also disappoint.

There are a lot of life experiences Shannon and I don’t share. I don’t know what it is like to experience discrimination because of my race, and I have never been attracted to religious orthodoxy. But I do understand the feeling of disconnectedness that can come from growing up in a family where no one looks like you, the yearning and questioning that can fill in the place of a missing father, and the struggle for self-acceptance.

These universal threads were what I latched onto and kept me turning page after page — the familiar and the foreign pulling me in. It’s what I like most about reading memoirs; I can pick up a book about a life completely different from my own, and for a few hours, stand in someone else’s shoes. And if I’m lucky, and the book is engaging and immersive, as The One Who Loves You is, then I am left enlightened and inspired by the act of connecting my own experience with another’s, binding reader to author, human to human.

Shannon and I met in April over Zoom, she in her home in Los Angeles and me in Toronto. What follows is a highlight of just some of the rich themes she covers in The One Who Loves You.

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Michèle Dawson Haber: I have a deep interest in memoirs about identity — it’s probably fair to say that every memoir is about identity to a greater or lesser extent. As a biracial person raised in an all-white household, your identity struggles have been in the forefront all your life. The reader is left with the impression that your white family gave you the love and acceptance you needed, but they also could have done so much better had they been aware of the implicit biases that caused them to treat you differently and which sometimes left you feeling outcast and inferior.

Our willingness to admit that the adults in our lives are capable of racism and other prejudices is a difficult hurdle to overcome. When did you realize that the black and white division you refer to in your subtitle applied not just to the external world, but also to your family world?

Shannon Luders-Manuel: I can’t think of specific instances at the moment. But as I read about other people’s experiences and noticed similarities, either in fictional or nonfictional narratives, and as I learned about the term implicit bias, I have to say for the most part, my family was extremely supportive and positive about my biracial identity. When I hear about other people’s experiences, like tales of overt racism coming not only from extended members of the family, but even one’s own mother, I’m extremely grateful for my family.

My grandma did have implicit bias that I think was largely due to her generation. So, I don’t blame that so much on her as an individual, but on the time period in which she lived. And I think, overall, she was very accepting and protective of me. The one person, of course, who was not accepting was my stepfather, and I don’t really count him as a member of my family in that way.

MDH: Oh yeah, he’s completely repellent! What else did you hope to convey with the subtitle: “growing up biracial in a black and white world?” Did you come up with it or did your publisher?

SLM: The publisher came up with the subtitle, though I did have a variation of it. I think it points to both my external world and my family. As a child, my world was mostly my family, because that’s who I spent most of my time with outside of school, and then as I got older, my world broadened to encapsulate my friends, strangers and going out and experiencing more of life. I had my black family and my white family, and I talk about the black side of town and the white side of town. It also subtly references black-and-white thinking, which ironically can’t accept the nuance of interracial relationships or people. So, sort of a round peg me trying to fit into a square peg America.

MDH: It’s not unusual for there to be some negative impact on a child who grows up with an absent parent. This is especially so when a child is not able to see that parent, to see themselves in the family that raises them—also known as genetic mirroring. But your father wasn’t fully absent. You knew he was out there, and you did see him from time to time. Do you think you would have felt more secure in your racial identity had he been a more regular presence in your life, or did you feel more keenly the absence of a father figure?

SLM: I definitely would have felt more secure in my blackness had I been around my father more because he was my tie to it. If he had been a bigger presence in my life, I just would have been in his neighborhoods more. His absence left me with a void in terms of blackness and also in terms of not having a father figure, because our visits were so sporadic. He didn’t do the things I associated with father figures, like giving advice, or providing for me, or being someone I could count on for anything. But I do have fond memories that I’ll always cherish. It’s weird, I feel like in one sense I totally did have a father and in another sense I totally didn’t.

MDH: About a third of the way in you talk about meeting another biracial teen at your Christian youth group who disappeared after a few weeks. You write, “Someone told me he had joined the gang after police had falsely accused him of doing something wrong. I understood sinking to the level one is expected to inhabit.” You spend your formative and early adult years doing what others expected from you. What was it that made you realize you could step off that path and forge your own way?

SLM: If I share that, it’ll give away too much of the ending, but I can share the level I was expected to inhabit around the time the biracial boy joined a gang and how I stepped off the path I was on that time: Most of the teachers my freshman year wrote me off and didn’t expect me to succeed, and I fell into their expectations and had a very low GPA.

But starting my sophomore year, my English teacher saw me as a smart person, and I started to do better. That teacher even wrote me a letter of recommendation for a scholarship in my senior year, which I received. I hadn’t been in AP classes, and I wasn’t deemed a smart person in general, and so I didn’t believe it about myself. When I won the scholarship, I remember I went to the awards ceremony with these students that I thought I didn’t have anything in common with academically. That was a huge turning point for me.

MDH: A note to the reader at the front of the book gives a lot of information about how this memoir came together. You say, “This memoir is drawn from my memories, letters, conversations with friends and family, and details from the thirty-odd journals I kept between 1988 and 2003.”

It was clear to me that these resources, particularly your journals, were integral to pulling the reader into your world. I was particularly struck by how authentic your child’s perspective came across. Can you talk a bit about both the advantages and challenges of transforming letters and journals into a compelling narrative?

SLM: Sure. So, the advantage I had was a wealth of information. I was extremely detailed in my journals. I didn’t think about who the audience was, I just poured everything out. I would even write conversations verbatim. The letters work because I feel like they elevated my dad’s own voice and made him a living character. The disadvantages of the journals were that, because there was so much, I had to really decide what information to use. I had someone in my writing critique group say, “you can’t say everything that’s in your journal.” This book is only 1% of what’s in my journals! So, the challenge was what to include and also how to make it literary in tone, instead of: “this happened, and then this happened.” I had to balance the voice of me at the time and the voice of me as an adult with a broader perspective.

MDH: Did you feel any trepidation about how your mom would react to your memoir? She doesn’t always come across favorably — although she’s your advocate at key moments, she also frequently lets you down. Similarly with your Uncle Adam. How to write the truth about living family members is a huge dilemma for memoirists. Could you talk about the approach you chose to take?

SLM: I had my mom read the advanced readers’ copy before the book came out. That was in December, and the book came out in February. It was too late to make any changes, but I did that purposely. I didn’t show it to her when it was in the editing stage because I didn’t want to feel impeded. She and I have a good relationship, so I didn’t feel like I would run the risk of burning a bridge. It was more for me not to feel blocked.

What was kind of a shock for her was learning how unhappy I was during my high school years with her and my stepdad. She knew I was unhappy, but she didn’t know just how unhappy. Reading that I felt like she hadn’t protected me from my stepdad’s emotional abuse was difficult for her at first, but she eventually recognized that she had neglected me and had neglected herself and she told me she was sorry. So, we worked through it, and it ended up being a positive thing which wouldn’t have come about had I not written the book.

MDH: At one point you see a psychological evaluation of your father obtained from an interview. In the interview, he makes up a slew of untrue things about his life. You write, “The truth was slippery for my dad, and he created a narrative that suited him, that cast him in a perennially positive light. But his doing so cost me an assurance of his life story and thus of my own.” Can you tell me more about this?

SLM: Growing up, I loved listening to my mom’s family tell stories around the dinner table at holidays and other events. I never had to question whether they were true. Even though they were hard to remember, they always felt like part of my own narrative, part of my own history. But I never felt that with my dad’s stories except when I was really little.

I wouldn’t say he made up a slew of untrue things in the interview, at least as far as I know. But I knew it wasn’t true that he was the one who ended things with my mom, and not because my grandma was intrusive. And I knew my mom hadn’t had an affair with my dad’s brother. I knew my dad’s drinking wasn’t caused by stress from his job, at least not all of it. But there were many parts that I did accept as true because they fit with who I knew him to be, like that he took an IQ test in the army that said he was smart, even though he had dropped out of high school.

Maybe I would have had a stronger connection to my dad’s narrative if I had grown up with him in a larger family setting like I had with my white family, where I could have listened to him talk with other adults instead of just with me. I think that’s maybe what made that narrative so special, and something I could claim for my own.

MDH: Can you tell me more about your publishing path from the perspective of a debut author — how long did it take to write, did you have an agent, and how was the submission process?

SLM: I probably was working on the book for 10 years before I started looking for an agent. Initially, I’d planned to finish the full draft, but then I had some friends who got a book deal on proposal, so I made the switch. I only had to query about 15 agents, but the responses that I got were interesting. I mean, most of what I got was silence, of course, and that’s standard. In one instance, I was put in touch with an agent and the response that I got was, “I’m already working with a mixed-race author.” And I found out that the author was writing a children’s book about a Latina girl. So, what conflict of interest would that have been?

MDH: Shameful. How did you find your agent in the end?

SLM: I got Farley Chase through a friendly acquaintance, now friend, who he represents. She had sent him 10 people before me, and he had said no to all of them, but he said yes to me pretty quickly. So, I was really fortunate that it worked out. He said he read the proposal and cried.

MDH. Wow. Well done on that book proposal!

SLM: Thanks. He’s been an amazing agent. He was expecting to get a really good deal really fast, because that’s what he does. But we were out on sub for six months, and the replies that he was getting were mostly: “We like this, but we don’t know what to do with it.” Mixed race stories are slowly getting published, but they’re still new.

Finally, after six months, we got in with Chicago Review Press, with Lawrence Hill Books, which is a Black imprint. We happened to get in because the editor, a black woman, personally believed that there is a place for mixed race stories at a black imprint.

MDH: How was the editing process? Did it happen with the agent or the publisher’s editor or both?

SLM: My agent was a really hands on editor for the proposal, he helped me spiff it up. Editing the manuscript was first with my critique group and then with my editor at the Press, and then back with the critique group. Once it got going, it was fast, but it took about a year and a half before it was looked at because of some internal shuffling at the Press.

MDH: Ooh, that must have been painful. What’s next for you? Are you working on any new writing projects?

SLM: I have an idea for my next book, which my agent likes, but first I’ll be working on some essays that correspond with the theme of this book. Stay tuned!

MDH: Shannon, thank you so much for your time today. It was a real pleasure to talk with you.