The Garden District Book Shop is pleased to share that award-winning journalist, co-host of CBS Saturday Morning and former first lady of New Orleans, Michelle Miller, will be at the shop to celebrate the release of her deeply personal memoir, Belonging: A Daughter's Search for Identity Through Loss and Love.
The event will begin at 3:00 PM where Miller will be available to visit with guests and personalize copies of Belonging. The event is open to the public but guests are encouraged to reserve their copy of Belonging.
Though Miller was an award-winning broadcast journalist for CBS News, few people in her life knew the painful secret she carried: her mother had abandoned her at birth. Los Angeles in 1967 was deeply segregated, and her mother—a Chicana hospital administrator who presented as white, had kept her affair with Michelle’s father, Dr. Ross Miller, a married trauma surgeon and Compton’s first Black city councilman—hidden, along with the unplanned pregnancy. Raised largely by her father and her paternal grandmother, Michelle had no knowledge of the woman whose genes she shared. Then, fate intervened when Michelle was twenty-two. As her father lay stricken with cancer, he told her, “Go and find your mother.”
Belonging is the chronicle of Miller’s decades-long quest to connect with the woman who gave her life, to confront her past, and ultimately, to find her voice as a journalist, a wife, and a mother. Miller traces the years spent trying to make sense of her mixed-race heritage and her place in white-dominated world. From the wealthy white schools where she was bussed to integrate, to the newsrooms filled with white, largely male faces, she revisits the emotional turmoil of her formative years and how the enigma of her mother and her rejection shaped Miller’s understanding of herself and her own Blackness.
As she charts her personal journey, Miller looks back on her decades on the ground reporting painful events, from the beating of Rodney King to the death of George Floyd, revealing how her struggle to understand her racial identity coincides with the nation’s own ongoing and imperfect racial reckoning. What emerges is an intimate family story about secrets—secrets we keep, secrets we share, and the secrets that make us who we are.
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