Tracy Clark-Flory’s “My Mother’s Daughter” Tells the Story of Finding Her Long-Lost Sister

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KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2026

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When she was 16, journalist Tracy Clark-Flory found out that she had a long-lost sister. Her mother shared that as a teenager, she had given up a child for adoption, and the grief of that act had sent her to a mental institution. There was not much more that her mother shared, and Clark-Flory did not ask. But years after her mother’s death, Clark-Flory set out to find her sister and learn more about why her mother could not keep her child. She tells that story in her new book, “My Mother’s Daughter.” Guests: Tracy Clark-Flory, journalist and essayist; author, "My Mother's Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family's Fractured Past" and "Want Me: A Sex Writer's Journey into the Heart of Desire"; her newsletter can be found at tracyclarkflory.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	You know, every day on Up First, NPR's Golden Globe nominated morning news podcast, we bring you three
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0:56.0	Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.
0:59.0	Tracy Clark Florey is one of our most clear-eyed observers of the modern world of sex and love.
1:06.0	She wrote a dynamite book called Want Me, which helped open the door to the reality of the millennial experience of sex and romance.
1:12.6	Her newsletters are real touchstone and sharing the gendered burdens of these 2020s.
1:17.6	And she co-hosts a podcast, Dyer Straits, about the ways that hetero life is and is not working.
1:22.6	Her new book, though, is different, engaging with the difficult social circumstances of mid-century
1:28.4	life as a young woman.
1:30.8	Her mother had a child as a college student, gave her up for adoption, and went on to move
1:35.4	to Berkeley and marry Clark Florey's hippie father.
1:38.7	They had Tracy, and for 16 years, that was the family that Tracy knew.
1:44.1	This book, My Mother's Daughter, is about what
1:46.1	happened when those two children from the different eras of her mom's life found each other,
	...

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