Edwidge Danticat—“an error on my father’s birth certificate had made him a Danticat, giving us a singular variation of the family name” (188)— is the narrator and author of the memoir. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1969, she moved to the United States 12 years later to join her parents in New York City. Danticat graduated from Barnard College and earned her master’s degree from Brown University shortly before publishing her debut novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, in 1994. In addition to her own writing, she has taught creative writing, has worked with the filmmakers Patricia Benoit and Jonathan Demme on projects about Haiti, and is an advocate for issues concerned Haitians both in Haiti and abroad.

She is 35 years old in the book’s present time and pregnant with her first child. A daughter of Haitian immigrants to the US, she spent the first 11 years of her life in Haiti, living with her Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise, who raised her and her younger brother Bob as their own children. In that sense, Edwidge feels she has two primary families: the formative one in Haiti, and the biological one in the US, as both her parents left Haiti when she was a small child.