To be totally honest I had never heard of Sunny Hostin before picking up her memoir, and for that reason I almost DNFed it.

This book ended up being everything I wanted but didn’t get from Kamala Harris’ memoir. (They even have overlap in career background as community prosecutors)

Her discussion on racial identity as a biracial, Afro Latina woman was fascinating to me and prompted so many thoughts and conversations as I shared what I was reading with Michael.

There’s a bit of a tell all about people she worked with at FOX, CNN and ABC, most of those names I’d only vaguely recognized. She goes deep into her journey with infertility. There’s also definitely a lot of self-importance, but when you read her whole story I think that goes to show you how much she had to be her own biggest advocate to get to where she is as a woman of color.

Prior to reading this book, I had never heard of Sunny Hostin. I don’t watch The View, since I am cord cutting millennial. (Cable TV? Is it 2002?) But my grandma loved The View. A few months ago, she asked me to get Sunny’s new book and read it. She had heard Sunny talk on the show about the book, and she told me she was curious about it.

The first time I ordered it, it got lost in the mail. So I opted for Target curbside pick up for my second try. And around the same time I started to read the book, my grandma’s health began to decline.

When I called her and told her I finally got the book, she was happy to hear that, but in that same conversation, she told me she thought she was on her way to heaven soon. When I went to visit her and brought the book to show her, she was bedridden and on hospice.

I really enjoyed this book, despite not knowing anything about Sunny Hostin prior to reading it. Sunny has had an interesting life, and she is honest, straightforward, and inspiring as she details her efforts to have “a seat at the table” - to not only pursue her own profession dreams but to also “tap into all the varied talents that can make this country what is has never been but has the potential to one day be.” I also especially connected with Sunny describing her experience being multiracial and growing up in a multicultural home. I don’t have the same ethnic or racial background as Sunny, but I am also multiracial and grew up in a multicultural home. I really connected with what she wrote about never feeling enough for any side - that “you don’t really count” because you’re not fully that ethnicity or race. Or people making misguided assumptions about you, or presuming they know or can speak on your own experiences. This is a perspective that is hard to find - the feeling that you need to check more than one box in a country that encourages, and sometimes forces you, to select just one. My only complaint about this book is that it was too short - I wanted to hear more from Sunny!

Thank you, Sunny, for writing this book, for speaking on the multiracial/multicultural experience so authentically, for speaking honestly about the struggles you’ve faced in an effort to bring about equitable change in this country. Thank you for all you have done to confront those obstacles to make a difference.

But I will forever remember this book as one of the last things that I shared with my grandma. One of my last conversations with my grandma was about this book. I read the book as she slipped in and out of being coherent. I read the book by her bed as she lay in a coma. The book sat in the room when she died.

So most importantly, for me anyway - Sunny, thank you for writing this book, because it helped me feel connected to my grandma even as she slipped away.