Award-winning journalist and CBS Saturday Morning co-host, Michelle Miller, has a secret to tell.
In her debut novel, “Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Love and Loss,” Miller shares a painful secret that not many people in her life knew she carried—that her mother abandoned her at birth.
Born in 1967, a time when Los Angeles was deeply segregated, Miller’s mother—a Chicana hospital administrator who presented herself as White—had an affair with Dr. Ross Miller—a married trauma surgeon and Compton’s first Black city councilman. The affair resulted in an unplanned pregnancy, leading the journalist to be raised by her father and paternal grandmother.
Miller had no knowledge of the woman whose genes she shared. It wasn’t until she was 22-years-old, when her father was sick with cancer, that her father advised her to “go and find your mother.”
These words later led to the story of “Belonging,” which tells the decades-long journey that Miller had to take to not just find her mother, but herself. The journalist and CBS co-host reflects on the years she’d spent trying to make sense of her mixed-race heritage while finding her place in a White-dominated society.
The book also shares the personal decade-long journey of Miller’s on ground reporting during some of the United States’ most traumatizing events, from the beating of Rodney King to the death of George Floyd. Revealing times where Miller struggled with her own racial identity, but also coinciding with the nation’s own ongoing racial reckoning.
“Belonging” tells the intimate story of family secrets—the ones we keep, the ones we share, and the ones that make us who we are.
“Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Love and Loss” is available everywhere books are sold.
