Sarah Sentilles

Sarah Sentilles brings a writer and teacher’s perspective to books that examine belief, responsibility, violence, art, and the difficult forms that care can take. Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours recounts the period when Sentilles and her husband, Eric, entered the foster-care system and welcomed a three-day-old girl they call Coco into their Idaho home. Random House published the first edition in 2021. The memoir follows the couple’s attachment to the child while keeping the system’s goal of family reunification in view, and it expands that experience into questions about kinship, protection, possession, and public responsibility. Sentilles studied at Yale and Harvard Divinity School and had previously written Breaking Up with God and Draw Your Weapons. Her theological and ethical interests remain present, but the memoir works through daily acts of feeding, waiting, paperwork, uncertainty, and love. Its full subtitle matters because the book asks how people can belong to one another without treating another life as something they own.