My Beloved Other - Publication Date and News
My Beloved Other - Publication Date and News
Announcing the title of our new book, and presenting the cover to My Beloved Other, by yours truly and my wife, Angela Watson. It is, as the sub-title says, a memoir of love, race and optimism in a time of denial.
This book was first commissioned in 2008 under the title Skin Trouble. It was, in reality, two separate projects— a book about the lives of Angela’s father and my father, and their different experiences when they came to the UK as immigrants in the late 1950s.
Anyone who knows me knows that I was also always talking about an “anecdotal book about racism and what it’s like being in a biracial or mixed race relationship.” Back in the early 2000s, this was almost a joke, a project to find a way of making light of the occasional “microaggressions” or biases we’d encounter, a kind of fun riff on “light racism.” That approach seems so naïve now.
Each project was essentially entirely separate, but at some point, in conversations with various agents and advisers, they became bound together and I found myself attempting to make the two stories work together as one.
That took far, far longer than I ever thought it would. After many abortive half-finished drafts over a decade, in 2019 I asked my editor (and founder and editorial director) at First Second, a very patient Mark Siegel, if I could bring on board my wife Angela as a co-writer, as I had an idea that a back-and-forth memoir structure would help me get around what had become something of a creative impasse. The plan was to just record us both talking to get a more “conversational” sensibility into the various family stories and observations on what was happening to societies across the world, the link throughout being us. (This also meant I’d have to put aside a lifetime’s disavowal of making myself into a comics character. Sometimes you just have to do the thing that takes you furthest from your creative comfort zone.)
Sixteen years in the making from conception to final art, this book is the result. It will be published in the USA by Macmillan’s 23rd Street Books imprint on August 8, 2026. You can read the official blurb here.
Please watch this space, and follow all our social media feeds for more news and inside stories on the making of the book. (I call it a book, because it’s not really a “graphic novel” as such. It’s a memoir that uses the language of comics to tell the story, and “graphic memoir” sounds a bit, well, inappropriate. Call it an anti-racist memoir in long comics format.)
I can be found here on BlueSky and here on Instagram, and there may be new, separate feeds for the book itself happening quite soon. I can’t wait to try TikTok (Hugo Tate face) and am already thinking up new ways to enrich our tech overlord fascist masters. You can also use the QR code below to find me on Instagram.
Anything you do, dear reader, to share and help the book be visible will be mightily appreciated.
Pre-orders really help us, so we’ll have links to all available online retailers soon (some are already up), and we’ll also have news of other, related ventures.
