I am a survivor of a very corrupt foster care system. So corrupt that there was a huge lawsuit exposing the dangeous situations they put us in, that sadly got swept under the rug as the attorneys who brought the case to court collected their checks and "settled" for system change that never happened. My system was recently in the news for Senate hearings exposing how messed up it is now. But its no where near as bad as it was.
In 2020 during the Covid lockdowns, I started working on a book about my experiences. I wrote it all more like a coming of age story rather than an expose. I felt like for people hear foster care statistics all the time and its easy to brush off cause its just statistics. And people knowing the statistics, never changed anything.
I wanted people to really understand that we were just children and for that that they needed names and stories to relate to. Its not enough to say "there was psychiatric abuse and sex trafficking' I wanted to show it happening to the kids that readers get to know and hopefully can see themselves in.
I relived every memory from my childhood, first kiss, first crush, my "arch enemy" my best friend… Being locked in rooms for days at a time. Sleeping on public transit to avoid being sent to jail after walking in on a staff member raping a kid….
I wrote 60% of the book during COVID lockdown. When i first pitched it, I was rejected by every literary agent I submitted to. One of them told me to make my character white to be more relatable to a broader audience. Another told me that she wished my character was "more tortured". Which given everything I wrote, felt to me like she wanted graphic depictions of child torture and less chatter about kids maturing & bonding in horrific situations. I'm sorry but i am not into torture porn, especially when it involves children.
The rejection broke me and I gave up writing it. It was too personal to have some privileged women.. tell me I was too black and not tortured enough to matter.
I recently went back to writing and I realized this would have to be two books. One about my first few years in care (13-15) and the horrors of institutionalization and the shelters they warehoused us in. And the second 16-19 about life on the streets and my fight against the foster system for an education and a safe place to sleep as well as to show the horrible things that happened to the kids introduced in the first book and other foster kids that I met on the streets.
Now, I am almost done with the first book and I am worried that I took the wrong approach. That it won't find a publishing home. If the lit agents didn't want the story as one book. Why would they want two? And if the things they read in the first book werent enough "tourture" for them to get into, why would they care about it now that I have leaned even more into the coming of age aspect.
Anyway my question is, for those of u who read exposes, memoirs, and coming of age stories… Did i make the wrong choice? Should i condense everything into one book that just outline all the horrific things I saw and experienced? Or do you think a couple of books thats basically a dystipian version of the Little House series could have an audience.
Thanks in advance for any insight and advice ytall can offer. Apologies for typos. Writing this from my phone and my curser has been going wild as i typed this out.
by acuteangina876