Book Club: SPLIT THE BABY with Lauren Rhoades and Catherine Simone Gray
Our June 2025 Book Club Selection (90s Glamour Shots Included)
We have the joy this month of gathering around the work of Rooted founder Lauren Rhoades to read her powerful new memoir Split the Baby: A Memoir in Pieces.
Since 2022, Lauren has lifted up the stories of those tied to Mississippi, and now Lauren invites us into her own intimate origin story. In the weekly Rooted questionnaire, we read the opening question, “What does home mean to you?” This question gains new significance as we follow Lauren’s memoir into the two different homes of her youth as a “child of divorce,” where “home” means two conflicting things.
Split the Baby is a thoughtful and big-hearted memoir of putting the pieces back together after a girlhood fragmented between households, religious traditions, and the disparate versions of self that grow in different environments—one loving and messy, one controlling and polished.
To make sense of her past, Lauren brings together an illuminating collection of archives to meet her memory, including her mother’s private “Parenting Diaries” from those years and the notes of the psychologist who evaluated her custody case. The effect is satisfyingly kaleidoscopic, with slight changes in vision and new shapes emerging as the story turns.
With equal parts curiosity and clear-eyed searching in her essays, Lauren invites us into a world colorfully textured with biblical texts and the archetypal characters of fairy tales, of bat mitzvah chanting and pancake house devouring, of sacred symbols like the crucifix and 90s touchpoints like mall photoshoot Glamour Shots. Sober reality meets gold-plated lore, and there is a glimmer for all of us to recognize in the troves of our past, no matter what pain hides there too. In fact, one fun discovery is that Lauren and I both took Glamour Shots at a mall around 1996, hers in Denver and mine in Iowa.
This moving memoir holds up a mirror for anyone who has straddled homes, cultures, or identities—the ones passed down to us with pride, the ones thrust upon us, and the ones we’re brave to choose. Lauren draws us close as she reckons with inhabiting her life in her own true way, leaving more room for us all to lean toward our wholeness.
I’m honored to be able to facilitate this special edition of the Bottom Reader Book Club with the roles reversed as we get to delve into the work of our very own Lauren Rhoades on Thursday, June 26 at 7 pm CT. As always, the live book club session is free to all. Paid subscribers will get access to the video recording of our conversation.
Now here’s the official description of the book:
In honest and captivating prose, Split the Baby chronicles the toll of divorce and family rupture from the perspective of a child who was nearly torn in two. Lauren Rhoades retells her experience of growing up caught between two homes run by equally strong women: a fervently Catholic stepmother and a deeply sensitive Jewish mother. Pulled toward radically distinct family cultures with rich but conflicting religious traditions, the young girl struggles to reconcile her stepmother's possessive charm with her mother's fierce and vulnerable love. Working with a trove of salvaged documents—including psychological evaluations, legal records, and personal family diaries—Rhoades searches for answers to questions of identity, spirituality, and the relationships that most deeply shape us. Ultimately, this debut memoir-in-pieces is a thoughtful story of learning to become whole again.
Lauren Rhoades is a writer, editor, and grantmaker living in Jackson, Mississippi. Originally from Denver, Colorado, Lauren has served with AmeriCorps, started Mississippi's first fermentation company, and helmed the Eudora Welty House & Garden. She is now director of grants at the Mississippi Arts Commission and a host of MPB’s The Mississippi Arts Hour. In 2022, Lauren founded Rooted Magazine, an online publication dedicated to telling unfiltered stories about what it means to call Mississippi home. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Mississippi University for Women. Split the Baby is her first book.
Catherine Simone Gray is a writer and teacher. She is the author of the recently released Proud Flesh: A Memoir of Motherhood, Intimate Violence, and Reclaiming Pleasure. Featured by Roxane Gay as an Emerging Writer in The Audacity, Catherine’s work has also appeared in The Bitter Southerner and the Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, as well as on her early blog Unsilenced Woman, which has reached 2.5 million readers. With an MA in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Mississippi, she has over a decade of experience as a writing teacher and leads writing workshops exploring how writing can be an ally in our living and loving. She lives in Jackson, Mississippi, with her husband and their wild band of two children, two cats, and a ball python.
Read ahead! Check out our upcoming book club picks:
July: World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After with author Martha Park
August: Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King with author Preston Lauterbach and moderator Talamieka Brice
September: Mark your calendars for the Mississippi Book Festival on September 13!
Last June’s Book Club
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Oh, my goodness! You have no idea how much joy it gave me to see that glamour shot, and being able to visualize Lauren with blond hair. I kept defaulting to thinking about Uncle Rico's glamour shots by Deb, and I knew that just wasn't right. :)
I read Split the Baby this week, and the 'follow-up' piece was pure lagniappe.
Beyond excited to read Lauren's book! If I can cope with living in a time zone +6 hours I would love to hear Lauren's responses to those wonderful MS questions.