A moving and vivid memoir of a young girl switching between worlds, wanting only to be loved. When Anais Granofsky’s parents met at Antioch College in Ohio in the early 1970s, they were each foreign and fascinating to the other – he, Stanley, the son of fantastically wealthy Jewish family from Toronto and she, Jean, one of 15 children from a poor Black Methodist family who are the direct descendants of the freed Randolph slaves. When they became pregnant at 19 and 22, they didn’t anticipate being cut off by the wealthy Granofskys. Neither did they anticipate that Stanley, soon to rename himself Fakeer, would find his calling in the spiritual teaching of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (subject of the Netflix doc Wild, Wild Country) and leave his family for the ashram in India. The Girl in the Middle is the story of the child that was born into these two, very different worlds and who spent her life navigating between them. Alone, Anais and her mother teetered on the poverty line, sharing a mattress in a single room in social housing in Toronto, while her grandparents lived a twenty-minute car ride away on the mansion-lined Bridle Path. As Anais grew up, she was invited to spend weekends with her wealthy grandmother, putting on special clothes when she arrived and being served lunch by the pool, while often she and her mother did not know where their next meal would come from. Anais soon realized that if she wanted to be loved, she had to learn to live two lives. Anais’s memoir offers a powerful lens into how these two families, one white and one Black, faced systematic oppression spanning multiple generations and came out at opposite economic classes—and how they clashed when they shared a granddaughter. With compassionate and vivid storytelling, Granofsky shares her experiences of living with each foot in opposing worlds and explores generational shame, grief, and prejudice, and ultimately love and forgiveness.

Issued also in electronic format.