I had many casual readers—friends, family, co-workers, give me lots of good feedback about my novel-in-progress, but I was missing a critical piece: understanding of an important character, an adolescent girl named Genève who had been adopted. I know little about adoption, and even less about transracial adoption (Genève’s biological father is black, the biological mother is white, and the adoptive mother is Jewish). While not all of my test readers were white, none of them had personal experience in adoption and none of them had a professional background in literature or in literary and cultural analysis. Hannah gave me what nobody else could, and for a very reasonable price.
I had technical adoption details wrong, and I had strong white bias in some of my descriptions that I had not been able to see with my own eyes. Hannah showed me cases where I perhaps had not even given other characters of color the same fullness of humanity as white characters. And while she uncovered these biases of mine and laid them out for me to see, she did so kindly and without judgment. This process improved my story, but was also a larger learning experience for me.
Although I had not asked for an edit, Hannah did call me out on several other random errors she caught, and I’m very grateful because these would have been embarrassing. I have very little budget for my work, but I’ve worked so hard on my story. I’m so glad I invested in a professional sensitivity reader, and I’m so glad that it was Hannah. She understood Genève and other characters of color better than I could.
Through this process, Hannah helped me bring a more believable character to life and helped me to be a better writer for and about all people.
Catherine Dehdashti