The Breaks
Learning to mother at the end of the world is an infinite toggle between wanting to make you feel safe and needing you to know that the earth and its inhabitants are facing a catastrophic crisis.
In The Breaks, Julietta Singh pens a luminous and moving letter to her six-year-old daughter about race, climate change and inheritance.
At school, Singh’s daughter is learning about history, society and culture but at home she must learn to challenge and interrogate these stories. As Singh and her daughter discuss subjects as wide-ranging and interconnected as race, the legacies of colonialism, queer family-making, extractive capitalism, mass consumption and climate catastrophe, their conversations reveal how our survival depends on breaking with the stories we’ve been told, and beginning to imagine new ones.
Bringing us up to the present day, Singh presents a remarkable vision of present collapse and future possibility.
Praise for The Breaks
New York Public Library, “Best Books of 2021”
Literary Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2021”
Book Riot, “Best Genre-Bending Nonfiction of 2021”
Seminary Co-op Bookstores, “Top 12 Best of 2021”
Ms. Magazine, “September Reads for the Rest of Us”
New Pages, “New and Noteworthy”
Lambda Literary Review, “September’s Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Literature”
“This is a lens-shifting book. Julietta Singh’s meditation to her daughter is an immeasurable gift. It takes you into the experience of coming of age as a Brown girl who stands in the shadow of a society that fails to tell its whole truth and tries to hide its ugliness. With poignant, aching, beautiful and deeply loving prose, Singh brings Brown girls into the sun, and makes you want to change the ways of the world for our young people and for us all.” —Imani Perry
“If a book can be a hole cut in the side of an existence in order to escape it, or to find a way through what is otherwise impassable, then this is that kind of book. Singh attends to the revolutionary prospects of ‘an act of breaking through, a transgression, a disruption.’ How will we live in the new space that we keep making, through refusal but also adjustment, the necessary accommodations to the ‘nowhere and nothing’ that this space also is? The Breaks leads us through such moments, questions, and scenes, with tenderness. And deep care.” —Bhanu Kapil
‘The Breaks is amazing—I read the whole thing through in one sitting. It’s got the heft and staying power of Baldwin’s A Letter to My Nephew.’ – Lauren Berlant
“A tale of queer homemaking and expansive kinship—of deciphering family pasts, shaping domestic presence, and imagining unknown futurities of belonging. . . . An honest and unassuming illustration of making thought public, of finding praxis in the quotidian—and daring to linger there.” —Christopher Schaberg, Los Angeles Review of Books
“In a kind of spiritual successor to the genre-defying No Archive Will Restore You, Singh reveals the most intimate details of her life and politics. . . . She exquisitely links theory and poetics to her own fears, insecurities, and certainty that one day her child will need to break away from her. This is a stunning work.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘Singh writes with a delicacy and dexterity entirely her own… This is a breathtaking, stunning text, one that encourages and makes tangible breaks from convention.’ – Meghana Kandlur, Seminary Co-op
“Singh's clarity of thought, vulnerability, and passion for social justice all render this well-structured essay a pleasure to read. . . . Her anxieties, fears, and triumphs will resonate with parents of all identities and backgrounds.” —Kirkus
“Piercing and profound. . . . For all the breaks and fractures, there are also the continuities and the flows. The Breaks is a gift for posterity—for others who may treasure it and take its vital, urgent message to heart.” —Sana Goyal, Brixton Review
“The climate crisis, state-sanctioned racism, the long coils of colonialism . . . These are among just a few of the harsh realities Julietta Singh confronts in The Breaks, a book-length epistolary essay written to her 6-year-old daughter, that also interrogates what it means to be a queer, brown parent in contemporary America. But despite myriad catastrophes, both personal and political, Singh finds reasons for hope in the possibility of community.” —Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub
“Singh contemplates how she and her daughter can live ethically in our current social and political systems, and how they can change them. Taking up race, physical vulnerability, queer parenting, and more, The Breaks is a wide-ranging, invigorating mix of memoir and cultural critique.” —Book Riot
“The Breaks, addressed to Singh’s daughter for her to read (at six years old) and re-read throughout her lifetime, meditates on the rupture between mother and child that will be necessary for her to inherit and transform this world. . . . [Singh] knows she must give her daughter other stories and other ways of understanding those stories. Yet fundamental to The Breaks is Singh’s desire to be taught ‘against [her] own teaching.’” —The Arts Desk
“The book feels committed to honesty and clear-sightedness above all else. I thought it was extraordinary.” —Rebecca Hussey