My Fighting Family

Praise

“This is a surprising book, a moving book that’s a love note to Campbell’s family, Black American resilience, Canada, music, and football. It’s not really about fighting as much as it is about how families can lose and sometimes find themselves in spite of everything that seeks to tear them apart: old grudges, bitter disappointments, and property. In this memoir, Campbell mixes poignant memories of his whirlwind childhood with perceptive analysis that only age and wisdom can bring. He elevates it with humour, wit, and empathy for people who aren’t necessarily empathetic. An impressive work that I’d recommend to anyone who wants to make sense of who they are and why.”
—Joel Anderson, Slate

“My Fighting Family offers a glimpse into a Black experience that is rarely discussed—what it was like for those who went so far north that they left the United States. That, plus the candid look at his own family, makes Morgan Campbell’s memoir worth reading.”
—Bomani Jones, The Right Time

“Morgan Campbell’s unflinching memoir dives deep into the complicated ways history, culture, and family intersect with identity. My Fighting Family is a beautifully crafted and endlessly entertaining coming-of-age portrait. A vivid storyteller, Campbell takes readers on a journey through his family’s proud but fractured past, entangled with trauma, love, and heartbreak. It is a funny, honest, and piercing story about straddling worlds while discovering who you are.”
—Dan Robson, The Athletic

“The fights are just the framework. Literal, yes. Metaphorical, sure. But foundational, without question. They span generations, countries, races, schools, and marriages, touching every branch of the family tree. Grudges held as long as presidential terms. Scars—physical and emotional—that faded and scars that still linger faintly. Skillfully marrying personal journalism with personal narrative, Morgan Campbell appraises not only the costs of every quarrel but shows the receipts for all the choices his family had to make to create a present for themselves and a future for the generations behind them. For all the ways conflict signifies dysfunction, Campbell shows how his family not only fought but functioned through it all.”
—Julian Benbow, Boston Globe

“The most combustible question anyone can pose is ‘Who are you?’, which is why so few of us dare ask it of ourselves. Morgan Campbell has done that here. My Fighting Family is his riveting, complicated, and compulsively readable answer.”
—Cathal Kelly, author of Boy Wonders