No Filter : Diary of a Polyamorous Black Girl

Alicia Bunyan-Sampson is terrible at telling lies, even the "white lies" that help smooth over awkward situations and avoid painful conversations.

This inability makes some things, like living with mental illness as a black woman, a challenge.

It makes other things, like having a monogamous relationship, impossible.

For Alicia, a polyamorous life is an honest one. It speaks true to her history growing up in a nontraditional blended family. And it allows her to speak truth to her experiences as a person with conflicting identities, struggling to reconcile her life as a polyamorous black woman with the intersecting stigmas and stereotypes that afflict those identities.

But sometimes being yourself means being by yourself: the road to Alicia's realization of a relationship free of dishonesty is paved with isolation, social awkwardness, and alienation.

No Filter is a personal genealogy, tracing the origins of what is often thought of as a purely modern model for relationships back to the earliest impressions of a woman's history.