Skinfolk: A Memoir - Hardcover

by Matthew Pratt Guterl (Author)

Could a picturesque white house with a picket fence save the world? What if it was filled with children drawn together from around the globe? And what if, within the yard, the lines of kin and skin, of family and race, were deliberately knotted and twisted? In 1970, a wild-eyed dreamer, Bob Guterl, believed it could.

Bob was determined to solve, in one stroke, the problems of overpopulation and racism. The charming, larger-than-life lawyer and his brilliant wife, Sheryl, a former homecoming queen, launched a radical experiment to raise their two biological sons alongside four children adopted from Korea, Vietnam, and the South Bronx--the so-called war zones of the American century. They moved to rural New Jersey with dreams of creating what Bob described as a new Noah's ark, filled with "two of every race."

While the venture made for a great photograph, with the proverbial "casseroles and potato chips out for everyone," the Brady Brunch façade began to crack once reality seeped into the yard, adding undue complexity to the ordinary drama of a big family. Neighbors began to stare. Vacations went wrong. Joy and laughter commingled with discomfort and alienation. Familial bonds inevitably buckled. In the end, this picture-perfect family was no longer, and memories of the idyllic undertaking were marred by tragedy.

In lyrical yet wrenching prose, Matthew Pratt Guterl, one of the children, narrates a family saga of astonishing originality, in which even the best intentions would prove woefully inadequate. He takes us inside the clapboard house where Bob and Sheryl raised their makeshift brood in a nation riven then as now by virulent racism and xenophobia. Chronicling both the humor and pathos of this experiment, he "opens a door to our dreams of what the idea of family might make possible."

In the tradition of James McBride's The Color of Water, Skinfolk exposes the joys and constraints of love, blood, and belonging, and the persistent river of racial violence in America, past and present.

Back Jacket

Matthew Pratt Guterl's Skinfolk explores a question we all face: What makes us kin? This fascinating story of his family's utopian experiment teaches us that it takes more than blood to bind us together. Guterl walks along fraught lines of race, language, color, and history with compassion and grace. In some moments gripping and at others intimately at ease, Skinfolk opens a door to our dreams of what the idea of family might make possible.
--Martha S. Jones, author of Vanguard

"An achingly moving memoir. . . . Matthew Pratt Guterl lays his scholar's eye over a complex narrative exploring the joys and limitations of love, family, and adoption."
--Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of The Evening Hero

"Skinfolk lays bare one family's dramatic attempt to create a kind of racial reckoning by offering up their own household as a model for integration and diversity. With unflinching eyes, Matthew Pratt Guterl examines his family experiment with an academic's precision, detailing the moments of transcendence, awkwardness, and longing. A fascinating read."
--Julia Scheeres, author of Jesus Land

"Matthew Pratt Guterl chronicles the struggle to build a family in the aftermath of war and social strife with grace and vulnerability. . . . The story of this family is unforgettable in its embrace of the personal and the political. The notion of belonging is drawn and redrawn across these pages with honesty and abiding affection. A powerful read."
--Wendy S. Walters, author of Multiply/Divide

"I've long admired Matthew Pratt Guterl's histories of race and racism in America, and in this moving, beautifully written memoir, he shows us how those same histories shape our most intimate attachments."
--Natalia Molina, author of A Place at the Nayarit