The Book

Growing up in 1960s New York City, I lived between two powerful but unreliable women: my glamorous single mother, who worked as a Pan Am flight attendant, and my German immigrant grandmother, whom I called Nana, whose past was wrapped in secrecy. The adults around me offered half-truths about my family, especially the identity of the father I had never known. I learned to support myself, trust my instincts, and imagine a life far beyond the circumstances into which I was born.

That determination carried me from scholarship classrooms and teenage jobs to presidential campaigns, the Clinton White House, the United States Senate, international public affairs work, and eventually the East Wing, where I became the first executive director of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative. Yet professional success could not resolve the question that had followed me since childhood.

Candid, vivid, and ultimately hopeful, Finding My Way traces my search for my biological father while confronting family trauma, sexual harassment, ambition, motherhood, adoption, forgiveness, and the complicated choices women make to build lives of their own. It is a memoir about the stories families tell, the truths they conceal, and the liberating realization that belonging is something we can create.

·  A child piecing together a family history shaped by secrecy

·  A young woman learning to survive and rely on herself

·  A pioneering career inside campaigns, government, and the White House

·  The search for a biological father and the truth behind decades of silence

·  Adoption, motherhood, forgiveness, and the family Robin chose to build

·  The conviction that our beginnings do not have to determine our endings