My debut memoir is out September 29, 2026!
Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter:
A Memoir From the Child of a Mail-Order Bride
Book Description
In this darkly funny and irreverent memoir, the daughter of a mail-order bride unpacks her undocumented childhood in America.
The perfect read for fans of the jaw-dropping twists of 90 Day Fiancé and the emotional gut punch of I'm Glad My Mom Died.
Growing up undocumented in Houston, Texas, Katya Suvorova learned that keeping her family together meant dodging the police, enduring her mother’s many husbands, and baby-sitting her younger sister instead of finishing the third grade.
Her understanding of her life shifted dramatically at seventeen, when Katya discovered her mother’s advertisement in a forgotten Eastern European mail-order bride catalogue from the 1990s. As she grew older, Katya came to better understand what her mother had risked when she smuggled herself and her then three-year-old daughter from Russia into the US.
When your parents sacrifice their lives so yours can be better, to whom do you owe your future?
Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter explores difficult questions and stories both shocking and hilarious across Katya’s childhood through to an adulthood estranged from the woman who sacrificed everything for her. Her sharp, dry wit engages readers in a deeply relatable take on the experience of being a child of immigrants and unraveling a landscape of family secrets and lies, sharing her unique story of being the undocumented daughter of a mail-order bride.
Praise
“Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter is a searing, eye-opening, and intimately honest account of what it means to come of age as an undocumented immigrant who has her childhood end too soon. I cried, I laughed, I could not put this book down. I will be thinking of Katya Suvorova’s words for years to come.”
“Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter is a heartbreaking but entertaining dive into immigration in America and complicated relationships between mothers and daughters, and surviving generational trauma.”
“In Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter, Katya Suvorova rides a knife’s edge between heartbreak and hilarity. The stories she shares from her upbringing as the daughter of an emotionally unstable mail-order bride are as absurd as they are brutal. This is tragicomedy at its finest”
“A piercing story of an undocumented childhood spent in the chaos of a mother’s desperate, brutal fight for American citizenship. Suvorova’s sharp-eyed memoir shines a light on the aspect of American immigrant experience few of us ever see. A story of power, family, and the lengths some people go to for security and love.”
“Suvorova debuts with a harrowing account of her childhood as a Russian immigrant in Texas . . . A brave testimony.”
“Delivered in searing and luminous fragments, Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter dares to tell the stories so many of us are taught to hide. It’s a turbulent narrative of family lost and family found and the layers and lies and love that cleave us to and from one another.”