An abusive, neglectful childhood is an understandable reason to feel traumatized in adulthood. However, it doesn’t have to define a person’s entire life. Authors Justin and Alexis Black recognized this in coming to terms with their own difficult childhoods. In reflecting on their pasts and refusing to repeat the mindset, behaviors, and history that gave them their start in life, they were able to transcend to a well-adjusted life as a happily married couple. Below is my interview with Justin and Alexis Black about the book that chronicles their history and philosophies, Redefining Normal: How Two Foster Kids Beat The Odds and Discovering Healing, Happiness, and Love.
About Redefining Normal
Alexis Black was six when her mother died and thirteen when her father went to prison for child endangerment. After subsequently surviving a long and abusive relationship, the college junior promised her foster parents that she would avoid romantic entanglements for at least a year. But when she met incoming freshman Justin on the first day of their scholarship program, they both felt the world melt away, leaving just the two of them in the room.
Justin Black lived in abandoned houses in the poorest section of Detroit before his parents surrendered him to CPS at the age of nine. He stayed in the child welfare system until he graduated from high school. Determined to be the first in his family to pursue higher education, Black attended Western Michigan University, where he met beautiful third-year Alexis. At first, their past traumas–and their age difference–conspired to complicate their attraction. But the joy each took in the other eventually conquered those obstacles, and these two survivors journeyed hand-in-hand toward healing.
Written in alternating accounts, Justin and Alexis offer a thoughtful exchange of ideas and personal experiences illustrating how anybody, no matter their background, can heal and find joy.
Redefining Normal: How Two Foster Kids Beat The Odds and Discovering Healing, Happiness, and Love is a page-turner of a memoir that will restore readers’ faith in dreaming big. Honest and vulnerable, this story is raw, wrenching, and necessary. Once you’ve read Redefining Normal, you will never perceive the plight of foster youth as an abstract statistic again. Justin and Alexis take you into the rooms where things happened, and their searing accounts will stay with you.
*This story contains factual depictions of domestic violence, trauma, sexual assault, and other difficult issues faced on the road to healing.
About the authors
Author name/pen name: Justin & Alexis Black
Author links (links will open in a new tab)
Book Title: Redefining Normal: How Two Foster Kids Beat The Odds and Discovered Healing, Happiness and Love
Genres: Nonfiction, Narrative, Autobiography, Memoir, Romance, Self-help
Book Summary
In their stark and often shocking story, Alexis and Justin reveal how two people brutalized in childhood managed to defy the odds, get healthy, and build a new life together. Guided by hope and a sense of purpose, as well as a desire to help others who have similarly suffered, they learned to reject the abusive patterns of their past, thereby breaking the cycle of generational violence and neglect.
Written in alternating accounts, Justin and Alexis offer a thoughtful exchange of ideas and personal experiences illustrating how anybody, no matter their background, can heal and find joy.
Review excerpt
“An inspiring and authentic autobiography. Written with raw emotion and brutal honesty, the message is further backed up with hard data and stunning statistics, presented with analytical authority that understands how to present a strong argument. Both touching and tragic, the authors are fearless in their storytelling, shining a powerful light on widespread, critical, and often undiscussed crises.” – Editorial Review
Talking Shop
What do you want readers to take away from your books?
Redefining Normal is meant to challenge the shaping of one’s identity. Readers will be forced to question the media that shapes their perspective, the community that establishes their values, and the family that created their sense of identity and love. Though this book details the lives of two kids’ journeying through the foster care system before forming a relationship, readers will leave this book questioning if the ideas and culture they’ve been taught since birth will sustain them moving forward while reevaluating the decision they make and its impact on others.
What is a fun or strange source of inspiration that ended up in your book?
My (Justin) experiences in Shanghai, China was an odd but huge motivational moment that landed in our book! Being from Detroit, MI, and living in the city until 17 years old, traveling abroad was not an option. It wasn’t until I met my now wife Alexis in college that I considered traveling abroad. I was excited, nervous, but prepared to study abroad for six weeks in Seoul, South Korea. Once I made it on the plane, I took another look at my ticket and noticed that I had a 13-hour layover in Shanghai. I landed in a foreign country completely unaware of what to do next.
I realized moments before my flight that I had a 13-hour layover in Shanghai, China before my second flight to Korea. I panicked. I arrived in Shanghai near midnight, completely petrified. The airport felt deserted; it was closing for the night. I stood in the middle of the airport lobby squeezing the handle of my luggage, paranoid about being stranded in a foreign country. My mother’s fear fueled my every thought. I needed to book a hotel and figure out how to catch a taxi. Multiple people came up to help me–walking in what seemed like circles, it was clear that I was a lost traveler.
I eventually made it to my hotel and my flight on my time. That night taught me some important things. Sometimes, you have to let go and trust people, trust that they are not out to get you. Second, be prepared! Had I checked earlier, I would have known about the layover and made plans in advance, avoiding the last-minute scrambling.
How long did it take to write your book from the day you got the idea to write it to the day you published it?
Co-authoring a book with your spouse could be a difficult task. Luckily, Alexis and I were able to feed off of one another’s energy during the book writing process. While exchanging ideas, we were able to finalize the book in approximately nine months. She had been wanting to write a book about the elements of healthy and unhealthy relationships based upon our personal experiences. After making suggestions on the direction and content of the book, we decided to co-author our book in an exchange of perspective regarding particular subjects matters including our definition of love, identity,
What is the most fun part about writing? The most difficult?
The most difficult part about writing is digging deep into your personal experience and detailing some of your most traumatic experiences. You are forced to relive those experiences by being reminded of the smell, what you heard, the things you saw. It is gut-wrenching to bring that trauma back to life and express it in an artistic way. The most enjoyable part about writing is having readers feel as if they are in the moment with you. It takes great intention and strategy to detail a particular moment in a way that impacts the readers. I live for reviews and feedback that describes how a particular moment sparked something within them.
If you don’t make a living exclusively writing, what is your day job? How, in any way, does it relate to your life as a writer?
Apart from being authors, my wife and I have two companies, The Scholarship Expert and the ROSE Empowerment Group. The mission of The Scholarship Expert is to help students find and apply for scholarships while teaching them how to maximize their college experiences personally, professionally, and academically.
The ROSE Empowerment Group’s mission is to establish sustainability in communities through group economics, building healthy relationships, and seeking value in local resources and networks. The purpose of creating this business was to help close the information gap for Black and Brown youth and young adults.
Buy it!
Buy a copy of Redefining Normal here, and help support local bookstores! This is an affiliate link, and I will earn a commission on any sales.
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Loving the sounds of this story; there is so much life passion behind it that cannot help but shine into the writing. Thanks for sharing!
It is nice to get to know these writers. The book sounds interesting.