“Stranger Care is a beautiful, harrowing, and profound memoir about what it means to love and to mother, to belong and let go. In prose so riveting I found myself holding my breath as I read, Sarah Sentilles writes about fostering—and attempting to adopt—a baby through the foster care system. With profound sensitivity and insight, Sentilles takes readers with her on her tender and wrenching path to motherhood, while grappling with the complexities, contradictions, and injustices of a system meant to protect the most vulnerable. I love this book so much it hurts. It’s a powerful, heartbreaking, necessary masterpiece.”
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Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours
The moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newborn—about injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin.
May you always feel at home.
After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, decided to adopt via the foster care system. Knowing that the goal is reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social workers who question, evaluate, and ultimately prepare them to welcome a child into their family—even if it most likely means giving them up. After years of starts and stops, a phone call finally comes: a three-day old baby girl, in immediate need of a foster family. Sarah and Eric bring this newborn stranger home.
“You were never ours,” Sarah writes, “yet we belong to each other.”
A fierce story about love and belonging, Stranger Care shares Sarah's discovery of what it means to take care of the Other—in this case, not just a vulnerable infant, but the birth mother who loves her too. With her trademark “fearless, stirring, rhythmic” (Nick Flynn) prose, the acclaimed author of Draw Your Weapons brings her creative energies to an intimate story, with universal concerns: What does it mean to mother? How can we care for and protect each other? How do we ensure a better future for life on this planet? And if we're all related—tree, bird, star, person—how might we better live?
Praise for Stranger Care
“Sarah Sentilles has written a deeply remarkable memoir so breathtaking and heartbreaking and smart and hopeful and important, and you might not even notice because you’ll be too busy feverishly turning pages. I less read STRANGER CARE than inhaled it, in the first place because I genuinely could not put it down but mostly because it felt like this story entered my bloodstream and changed me. This is a memoir for anyone who has ever loved a child — or a whale or a bird or a tree — or indeed any part of this hard, beautiful world we all share, which is to say everyone. This is a memoir for everyone.”
—Laurie Frankel, Author of This Is How It Always Is
“Stranger Care is a gripping and beautiful memoir about marriage, family, bureaucracy, community, heartbreak and hope. With wisdom and honesty, Sarah Sentilles shares a personal story that is also a story about how we live in America today — and why we must find new ways to love and care for one another.”
—Ben Rhodes, Author of The World As It Is, Host of Pod Save the World, former Deputy National Security Advisor under President Obama
“Sarah Sentilles’ Stranger Care is an illuminating and heart wrenching look at the foster care system in America, which includes half a million children and disproportionately impacts parents and kids of color. Sarah's personal experience as a foster parent, combined with her reportorial examination of a deeply flawed system, makes Stranger Care a transformative revelation.”
—Piper Kerman, Author of Orange Is the New Black
“In STRANGER CARE, Sarah Sentilles offers us a book that calls us to redefine what it means to have and make a family, to expand our understanding of what and who belongs, and to care more and better for those around us — for our friends, for our children, even and especially for strangers. It’s a work of radical moral philosophy as much as a memoir of one family’s journey through the foster care system. Their story has changed me — it broke my heart wide open in the best possible way — and I don’t think I’ll ever be same.”
—Lacy Johnson, Author of The Reckonings
“Sarah Sentilles has done it again: placing herself in the most difficult of positions for the sake of the most vulnerable, in service to individuals and to the world. STRANGER CARE is a book about loving a child without boundaries, without bloodlines, without limits. This is the only book about parenting that I would recommend to anyone, because it strikes at the essential, complicated, and heartbreaking core of what parents do every moment of every day: love, love, love, love. No matter what.”
—Emily Rapp Black, Author of THE STILL POINT OF THE TURNING WORLD