Matthew Pratt Guterl says he’s probably been thinking about writing his new book, Skinfolk: A Memoir (Liveright, March 28), since he was 5 years old.

That’s when his parents, Bob and Sheryl, who are both White, adopted his brother, Bear, from Vietnam, where the boy was endangered because his dark skin was a sign that his father was African American at a time when American occupation of Saigon was unpopular and quickly ending. Bear, who is only a month older than Guterl, is the second child his parents adopted but the first addition he remembers.

It’s also when his father started to talk about their New Jersey home as “a biblical ark for the age of the nuclear bomb, of race riots, of war” and his desire to have a family with “two of every race.” No wonder Guterl became fascinated with race and history—writing about racial profiling, Southern slaveholders, as well as the life of Josephine Baker. He is currently a professor of Africana studies and American studies at Brown University.

Skinfolk is Guterl’s memoir of how his family of eight came to be and what it came to mean, both as some sort of racial experiment and as people who came to love one another despite their differences.

Guterl talked about why he wanted to write about his family and what they can teach others about diversity over Zoom from his home in Rhode Island. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Where did the idea for this book come from?

I really started taking it up in earnest as a writing project during Covid. It was a moment where I didn’t have a lot of chances to see people. It felt like a good time to take up something new and different and try to work out my thoughts and feelings and put them on the paper.

How hard was it for you to apply academic rigor as a historian to your parents and their actions?

It was very hard. I think these things are so intertwined with who I am, and what I am now, in part because it’s the world that made me. I am an academic because I have always been thinking about these things, and I have always been thinking about these things because I grew up in this family. So there’s a complicated connection there between the work I do and the way I think about my family.

It was hard to talk to my mom. She was very courageous to talk to me as honestly as she did about a lot of what she and my father had attempted to do and very generous to give me access to her time and materials that had been in her basement. Once I got to actually doing the work, doing the writing, once I sort of opened up those old boxes and started going through the materials, then the historian’s instinct sort of kicked in. Then it was a matter of looking for evidence and looking for patterns and checking them against my own feelings, my own memories, my own sense of things, and then trying to do justice to the story of our family.

Was it easier to look back at what you and your family had done through that historical lens?

Absent a historical lens, your instinct is to look for intent and to try to find blame and to look for failures and mistakes. As a historian, there are no mistakes. Everything emerges out of a historical context and everything makes sense. For me, trying to understand what happened to us as a family, it was really easy to move from the early ’70s through the ’80s and come to an understanding about how history had changed in the country and had tilted in one direction. That helped me to understand the background context for a lot of what happened to us. It took me, at least a little bit, away from the question of responsibility, fault, and blame, which is how I think many people might write a story like this. It lets me see it with a historian’s eye and reminds me that context determines a lot of things.

Many memoirs are: “My parents really messed me up.” Or: “My parents messed up our whole family.” You’re not doing that.

I’m glad you say that. At the same time, I hold myself accountable in a number of ways. For me, it was very important to recognize the choices that I had made, even if I set them in context. Things that I did when I was 12 or when I was 13 really determined who I am and how I think about myself. I was trying to be fair and honest, so I also had a skeptical look at myself. It would be really easy to write a story like this and then just say, Isn’t this amazing that I grew up in this fabulous and fantastic family? And it surely made me into an amazing person. And that’s not what I wanted to say.

How did your family affect your views on diversity?

We were a little multiracial democracy in the family, and we are still a polyglot democracy. We were uneven, and so is the landscape around us right now. To a certain extent, I’ve always been asking the question that we still ask nationally: What does it mean that we’re all here together? And how can we do this fairly and equitably and with justice?

But I think also as a kid I was wrestling with questions. I’m thinking about the moment I’m talking about watching movies with my brothers and sisters and keeping track of representations on screen. I mean, we were 8 or 9, and we’re watching all of these Black characters come on the screen and routinely die in these action movies that my father loved to watch. I was feeling something for my brothers at the time—worried that they’d be depressed by the loss of so much Black life on screen or the absence of Asian life on screen. I think that is where we are today, nationally. I feel like we’re very attuned to missing populations. We have a heightened sensitivity right now about representation, and I feel like I always had that as a consequence of my siblings.

Your relationship with your brother, Bear, whom you write about being more popular in school, seems like an example of how we can all appreciate diversity.

His arrival was a shock because I was 5 at the time that he arrived. We had almost the same birthday, and he was better looking, more athletic, funnier, and more interesting than me—and in so many ways that pattern continued for the rest of our lives, really. In high school, that was never a source of envy or jealousy. It provided me with a context to admire him on so many different levels—his dedication to being a superior football player, his commitment to reading, his humor. He was a real symbol for me of what a wonderful older brother and what an idol would be. And I think there’s some sense in the book that we should all have idols like that, irrespective of their skin tone or personal history.

Glenn Gamboa is a freelance writer in Brooklyn.