At the time Charlotte Gill's family moved to Canada, there was no "language for talking about mixedness," that is, the experience of being racially ambiguous and disconnected from your cultural heritage. Her memoir, Almost Brown, seeks to find those connections, both to a sense of identity and to separated family ties.

In Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir, a young Charlotte recalls her experiences living in the diaspora in Toronto and New York. As the daughter of a Punjabi Sikh father and English mother, following their divorce, she looks into the frayed familial relationships that brought them to the present. Later in life, after spending time in India, Gill reconnects with her father and attempts to answer questions about what it means to be mixed-race and have two parents with very contrasting views on parenthood.

Gill is a B.C.-based writer of Indian and English descent. She is also the author of the memoir Eating Dirt and currently teaches writing at the University of King's College.

She spoke with The Next Chapter's Antonio Michael Downing about the difficult, yet affirming journey she took in writing Almost Brown.

That is such a great question. I think when we are growing up, we just sort of understand that our parents are our parents and everything is really quite normal. But around about when I hit adolescence and became a teenager, it started to occur to me that this was a really unusual pairing. I mean, they came from two vastly different cultures: my mother is English, my dad's Punjabi Sikh, and they also had very polar opposite personalities as well. My dad is a complete extrovert, my mother was much quieter.

I think when they first met, it probably had something to do with the fact that they were in [medical] school together, they had that in common. My father was really looking for purchase in the United Kingdom at that time, he was trying to find his way into that society as a total newcomer. I think my mother was really looking for a way to be a little bit rebellious, to do something that was completely out-of-the-box and I think there was something about my dad that represented some danger and risk and she went for it.

I think when we're children what goes on in our households just feels normal. But now that I'm an adult and I have read a lot on race and culture and thought a lot about family and belonging as a result of writing this book, I really feel that family is the thing that connects us to our cultural pasts and when there's a familial break, it's almost like there's no one there to translate for us what the past means and why cultural traditions are important. So because I had no connection to my grandparents, on my paternal side especially, it took me kind of like a little bit of self education to figure out what it meant to be half Indian.

I started experiencing friction with my dad when I was a teenager and that's because I felt in my burgeoning feminist sense of identity that there is something really unfair happening in the household. I can see all of the hard work kind of sliding my mother's way, but also, I have a twin brother. I could see the definitive ways in which my father treated my brother differently: he didn't have curfews, he didn't have to stay in the house, he had much more freedom than I had once I became a teenager. This became the source of all of our conflict, me and my father, and I carried that with me after my parents divorced. I just thought, "I don't think I can really hang out with this person for a little while." Estrangement is a really strange thing, it's very complicated for a lot of people. I didn't speak to my dad or have any contact with him for almost 20 years which is quite a grudge and I'm aware of the irony there because my dad and his father also had a grudge that lasted multiple decades, but eventually we reconciled. But I felt on my own as I went out into the world that I just needed a little bit of space from all the trouble that had gone out in my household so that I could make a life of my own.

My dad was born in Punjab pre-Partition and then his family moved to Kenya, which is where he was brought up. He never returned to India and so in many ways, I don't think he really had that direct connection with his own culture, he mostly got it from a family and extended family. But when I was in my late 20s, I'd always felt kind of drawn to India, I knew I wanted to go there. So I spent a few months in India and I could see everywhere, when I was walking down the street, traces of my father's habits, things that I had always assumed were quirks of his I could now see had come from this place. Indian men have a very particular way of wearing a scarf or wearing a hat. The way he would drink tea, the way he would drink water… all of these things came from a place I had just assumed was just a tick exclusively to him and it gave me this idea that maybe a lot of things about the way that my dad is, like the way he treats his daughters comes from a cultural place and it's not a personal bias. It gave me a little bit of room to forgive him.