When Anais Granofsky’s parents meet in the early 1970s, they are foreign and fascinating to each other. Stanley is the son of a wealthy Toronto Jewish family; Jean is one of fifteen children from a poor Black Methodist family, direct descendants of the freed Randolph slaves. When Jean becomes pregnant at nineteen, Stanley doesn’t anticipate being cut off by his parents nor finding his calling on an ashram in India.

The Girl in the Middle is the story of a child who spends her life navigating between two very different worlds in Toronto. Alone, Anais and her mother teetered on the poverty line, sharing a mattress in a single room in Parkdale, while her grandparents lived on the mansion-lined Bridle Path. As Anais grows up, she spends weekends having lunch with her grandmother by the pool, while during the week, she and her mother often don’t know where their next meal will come from. It isn’t until she gets a role in the ground-breaking, Toronto-set and filmed TV series Degrassi Junior High that Anais finds a third world—her own—and begins to define an identity for herself.

Exploring Anais’s life as well as the history of her parents, The Girl in the Middle offers a powerful lens to explore how two families, one white and one Black, faced systemic oppression spanning multiple generations and came out at opposite economic classes—and how they clashed when they shared a granddaughter.