Blog tour: A Normal Family

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Welcome to the blog tour for A Normal Family by Chrysta Bilton!

More about the book…

For most of her life, Chrysta Bilton was one member of a small, if dysfunctional, family of four. There was her sister, Kaitlyn, her hedonistic, glamorous, gay mum Debra, and Jeffrey, who Debra hand-picked, in an LA hairdressers, to be the father of her children. During Chrysta's unstable childhood, Debra struggled to keep the family afloat and Jeffrey wandered in and out of their lives.

Then, in her twenties, Chrysta discovered that her father had secretly donated his sperm over 500 times - and that she had at least 35 other siblings.

A Normal Family is a captivating coming-of-age memoir about Chrysta's reckoning with the secrets both parents had carefully kept from her. Heartfelt, warm and funny, it's a story of embracing the family we have, in all the forms we find it.

More about the author…

Raised in Los Angeles by an eccentric mother and a father who struggled with mental illness, Chrysta Bilton was in her mid-20s when she found out that her family was much more complicated than she ever could have imagined. She graduated from Barnard College in New York, studied classical drawing and painting at the Florence Academy of Art and currently runs her own public relations firm. Chrysta lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer Nick Bilton, their two children, Emerson and Somerset, two dogs and one cat, Pixel, Pine Cone, and Piano. A Normal Family is her first book.

My impressions…

What an amazing read! As my children were conceived with the aid of a donor, I am currently in the process of looking for their half-siblings all over the world. You can imagine how I was immediately intrigued by the synopsis of this memoir, which I found honest and utterly fascinating. Families really do come in all shapes and sizes!

Three words to describe it. Relevant. Captivating. Interesting.

Do I like the cover? Yes, it’s the picture of an idyllic childhood. And evidence that pictures don’t show everything there is to see!

Have I read any other books by the same author? No, but only because this is the author’s first book.

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