A review by Michèle Dawson Haber

In What They Never Told Us: True Stories of Family Secrets and Hidden Identities Revealed (Skyhorse Publishing, December 2024) Gail Lukasik picks up where her 2017 best-selling memoir, White Like Her: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing, left off, describing how telling her mother’s story of racial passing catapulted Lukasik into the public spotlight and transformed her into a spokesperson for others encountering sudden genetic surprises. Strangers began approaching her looking to share their stories. and it was this experience that convinced her to write What They Never Told Us. “The first step toward understanding the impact of family secrets is to give them a voice.” Lukasik does so with respect and care in this fascinating collection of interviews with adoptees, donor conceived people, and individuals who have uncovered previously hidden genetic histories.
The book is divided into thirds, with each part focused on a different grouping of people affected by sudden identity shocks. The first group consists of those who, like Lukasik, discover their racial or ethnic identity is not what they thought it was. In 1995, while looking up census records of her family, she discovered the grandfather she’d never met was Black. She realized then that her mother had been passing as white, never telling her husband or her children about her racial background. Abiding by her mother’s wish not to reveal the truth to anyone, Lukasik waited until her mother died to begin exploring what this new information about her ancestry meant to her. Thirty years later she’s still exploring, asking questions, and challenging perceptions of racial identity.
The second part of What They Never Told Us is devoted to stories of adoptees whose parents withheld crucial information about their identities. In some cases, their parents withheld the very fact of their adoption and in other cases the ethnic origins of their biological parents. In part three, Lukasik talks with donor conceived people, including four half-siblings who meet after discovering they were conceived with the same sperm donor.

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By Bruno Giles

July 17, 1956 Switzerland

Today, my foster mom showed me something neat called the KinderPass. It looks like a small book, similar to the ones she reads to me at bedtime. Since I can understand a bit of German, I know it means “child’s passport.” The title is also written in French—”Passport pour Enfants”—and Italian—”Passaporto per Bambini.” I think I like the Italian the best! I’m not sure what this little book is for since I’m only 18 months old, but she says I’ll need it soon.
The book has no pictures and mostly empty pages. It has my birthday printed on it and states that I’m a citizen of Switzerland. I’m not sure what that means, but I hope it’s a good thing. I like Switzerland!

Medical Exam for Visa Applicants Aug. 25, 1956
Me and my foster parents went on a field trip today. OK, it wasn’t a real field trip, like to a park or anything, it was to a doctor’s office. It was just a short ride downtown. They said I had to get a check-up because some people at the American Consul wanted me to. They wanted the doctor to find out if I was sick or had some kind of disease. Contagious disease, I think I overheard them say. They figured out that I was disease-free, with no tuberculosis or leprosy, which is good because l don’t like leopards. They also said I had no obvious mental defects. 

And guess what? They gave me chocolate candy afterward! Chocolate makes me happy!

Airports, two months later.
I’m so tired, and mad too. My foster parents drove me to the airport and gave my little book and other paperwork, you know, the ones I told you about, to a lady who put me on a plane. My foster mother gave me a long hug, it kind of hurt me. They both waved at me a lot as the other lady took  me to show me the inside of the plane. I don’t know why but my parents seemed very sad. My mother said something was in her eye.

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Gina Cameron was always aware that something in her family wasn’t quite right. Her relationship with her father was volatile—strained and lacking in warmth and closeness. Her mother was critical, controlling, and went to great lengths to point out the ways in which the mother and daughter were different. But Cameron had no idea that for 63 years her mother had been keeping a profoundly disturbing secret.

It wasn’t until Cameron was in her sixties and her mother had died that the secret tumbled out. At a family reunion, her cousin Dan inadvertently dropped a truth bomb in a casual conversation, commenting that Cameron and her sister had different fathers. Her family had always been aware, he said, and had been told not to tell her, but he was certain that by that time she’d have known. She was blindsided by this revelation that, in turn, triggered a childhood memory: an aunt saying, “Louie isn’t Genie’s father.” When she later confronted her mother about what she’d overheard, her mother not only insisted it wasn’t true, she also accused her of being ungrateful, shameful, impertinent. She was ignored for days by her parents and stuffed this experience deep down, only to have it resurface five decades later.

Rattled by her conversation with Dan, Cameron arranged a meeting with her father’s niece Ellen, and got a lead for another piece of the puzzle of her origins while strolling together on the High Line in New York. Ellen called her sister Karen, who in turn phoned Cameron and recalled that they two had met when Cameron was three years old—when Louie had met her mother. And again, a memory arose from deep within her—from the time her father, in a letter, disowned her when she was 42 years old. “You’ve been a thorn in my side since you were three years old,” he wrote. She was sick, he’d said, selfish, hurtful.

Looking back after all those years, it all began to make sense. “Scenes from my past crowded my waking hours,” she writes. “The revelation about my paternity was a new frame for the puzzling, troubled undercurrents I’d always felt in my childhood home. For that, I was grateful.”
Grateful for a reason why she’d been seen as the family’s problem, why she’d been branded bad, a compulsive liar, a stubborn and willful child, why she’d been locked in a closet as a punishment as a child, locked in her room when her parents went out, and locked in a hotel room during a family vacation. That gratitude found expression when, at a family visit, her cousin, Carol, asked if Cameron had felt that she’d been treated differently as a child—something she and other relatives had clearly observed. When Cameron acknowledged those feelings, Carol took her hand and said, “Now you know you weren’t crazy to feel that.”

“I bathed in her words and gesture—a simple acknowledgement of my perceptions, believed as fact, no judgment. Seen, and accepted, I felt more and more at home.”

The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to take shape, but there was no one involved who was still alive and could confirm all the details of what had happened or answer a burning question: Who was her father?

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For many of us, DNA test results have delivered news that’s made nothing in our world seem normal. Our families may not be our families. The truths we’ve known may not be truths at all. We’ve been upside-down, turned around, and left looking for some kind of foothold—a way to ground ourselves in this new unreality. Then came a virus and a quarantine that have made everyone’s lives anything but normal. On top of that, an unprecedented political climate along with civil unrest have been both globally and personally destabilizing. If that weren’t enough, bring on the holidays, which for some in the best of times are difficult, stressful, and grief-inducing. But this year, even those who typically find the season joyful may experience sadness, disappointment, and grief.

If you experience anxiety, it’s likely been magnified in (or by) 2020. If you’ve experienced trauma, the fear and isolation caused by the pandemic may be retraumatizing. If you’ve been alone in quarantine or can’t spend the holidays with the people you love, your loneliness may seem overwhelming. Even if you’ve been holding your own, the common sorrow—the empathy and compassion fatigue for all who are struggling—may be depleting you. This state of life as we know it now may be getting on your last nerve.