Books

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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By Cindy Olson McQuay

Michelle Madrid, now an adoptee empowerment coach, was adopted by an American couple when she was a baby in the United Kingdom. Growing up, she experienced the complex emotional challenges and disturbances familiar to many adoptees, including anger, distrust, and feelings of unworthiness. She addresses these issues, as well as other often unaddressed repercussions such as PTSD, suicide risk, and fear of abandonment, in her book, Let us Be Greater: A Gentle, Guided Path to Healing for Adoptees.

Even though the book is addressed to adoptees, I highly recommend it for everyone. It’s an enlightening guide to personal and collective transformation. Combining introspective reflection with actionable advice, Madrid inspires readers to grow personally while contributing to their communities and the world.

Organized into sections on self-improvement and social responsibility, Madrid uses personal anecdotes, motivational insights, and practical exercises to guide readers on a journey of self-discovery, resilience, and leadership. Her engaging and accessible writing, filled with real-life examples, adds authenticity and depth to her message. Each chapter concludes with practical exercises and reflection prompts to help readers apply the concepts and track their progress.

It’s an inspiring guide for anyone looking to improve themselves and make a difference. Madrid’s comprehensive approach to personal development, engaging style, and actionable advice make this book a valuable resource for readers at any stage of their growth journey. Whether for overcoming personal challenges, developing stronger relationships, or taking on leadership roles, this book provides the tools and inspiration needed to achieve your goals and contribute to the greater good.

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From Right to Know’s Kara Rubinstein Deyerin, My Re-Birthday Book is an ingenious workbook for adoptees, NPEs (not parent expected), and donor-conceived people—anyone who’s had a DNA surprise or a shift in understanding about family ties. As a birthday book celebrates a new life and forms a record of identity, this Re-Birthday book does the same for those who’ve had to reimagine their families and their identities after experiencing a shocking disconnect. It’s a space to process the changes and challenges and document the journey—a creative means of affirming and documenting a profound transformation. Filling in the pages is certain to be an exercise in self-reflection, leading to a deeper understanding of oneself. For people who may have felt like life had rewritten their stories, this workbook is a tool to take the narrative into their own hands and rewrite their own stories.
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When Julianne Mangin was young, her mother, Pauline, would recite these meager facts of her own family history: that her mother ran a delicatessen, a business set up by her uncle; that when Pauline was six, her mother was sent to a mental hospital; and that the girl was then taken from her “good father” and left to grow up in a county home. Over time, Mangin came to wonder why these memories, recalled without emotion or elaboration, came to summarize the family history. How accurate they were, and what wasn’t being said? Secrets of the Asylum—a decades-long endeavor to answer these questions, points to the limitations of family lore and the power of denial.

In 2012, after her mother moved to an assisted living apartment, Mangin took possession of boxes of her photo albums and—though she had little interest in them—her genealogy files. But several weeks into retirement from her career as a librarian at the Library of Congress, she became curious. What she found was a haphazard collection of records, with duplicate and misplaced files and great gaps in research—surprising since her mother had also been a student of library science.

Mangin took up the task of organizing the materials but had no desire to pick up where her mother left off. But as anyone who’s jumped into genealogy rabbit holes knows, once you start, even if reluctantly, it’s nearly impossible to stop. Mangin became curious about the gaps in her mother’s records, wondering if they were intentional and whether they existed because additional information might upend the stories Pauline told herself.

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If you’ve made a shocking family discovery, it likely threw you off balance, maybe even knocked you down. You may have been—may still be—bewildered, angry, hurt, confused, anxious, depressed, or ashamed. You may have experienced all of these emotions and others in succession, all at once, or in an unpredictable pattern. You may feel overwhelmed and unable to make sense of all the feelings and at a loss about how to communicate your thoughts. That’s why licensed therapist Eve Sturges created Who Even Am I Anymore: A Process Journal for the Adoptee, Late Discovery Adoptee, Donor Conceived, NPE, and MPE Community. Host of the popular podcast Everything’s Relative with Eve Sturges and an NPE (not parent expected) herself, she’s deeply familiar with the many ways the revelation of family secrets can sideline a person. It’s not a substitute for therapy, nor was it intended to be, but this first-of-its-kind journal is just the tool many need to help them on this unexpected journey; and for those who are in therapy, it can play a role, helping them think about their reactions and improving their ability to articulate their feelings. Sturges doesn’t provide answers. Instead, she offers prompts to stimulate your thoughts and kickstart self-expression. She asks questions and provides a safe space in which you can explore the answers, either privately, within a group, or with a therapist. Deceptively simple, it’s a crucial resource that’s certain to make a difference for thousands of NPEs and MPEs.

Born a member of the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, Vicki Charmain Rowan was adopted at two by a white couple who renamed her Susan. Already, at two, it was as if she were a child divided.

Harness has spent most of her life straddling two worlds, never having a secure footing in either, learning early that “It hurts to be an Indian” in the world in which she lives. Her extraordinary memoir, Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption, is evidence that one can pluck a living thing from the soil in which it grew and plant it elsewhere, and though it may survive, surviving isn’t the same as thriving. Her account is a reckoning of a bitter isolation and a harsh record of a tenacious search for a sense of belonging. It’s a story streaked with a particular kind of loneliness, the kind that takes hold not in solitude but among people in whom the author can’t see herself reflected.

Raised by a mentally ill mother and an alcoholic father, Harness sees herself as different from those around her, and she’s acutely aware that she’s perceived by them to be different, not only by the townspeople, but even by her father, whose lexicon is laced with ethnic slurs and who speaks derisively about Indians, describing them as gold diggers, deadbeats, “goddam-crazy-drunken-war-whoops.” She’s aware she’s not the cute little blond-haired blue-eyed girl her father says he always wanted. And at the same time that she feels hatred toward him, she’s aware of a self-loathing coiling inside herself.

She encounters few people who looked like her growing up, and she’s reminded at every turn that she doesn’t fit in. She lives in a kind of a gap between cultures where a question took root early: what did it mean to be Indian if she wasn’t raised in an Indian family? “The Indians don’t want me; the whites don’t accept me. They push me into each other’s court, always away from them. I am isolated; I am in-between,” she writes.

Everyone who’s had a DNA surprise will recognize themselves in the pages of Leeanne R. Hay’s NPE* A Story Guide for Unexpected Discoveries. Hay, a freelance journalist who’s earned certificates from the University of Florida College of Social Work, has crafted a memoir/guidebook hybrid, drawing substantially from her own NPE story and those of others to illustrate common experiences and issues that arise when family secrets are revealed and individuals learn that the families in which they were raised may not be their families of origin.

In 2017, on a whim, Hay purchased a DNA test, the results of which were shocking. Not only did she learn that the man who raised her was not her father, she discovered at the same time that her biological father was a man she’d known and loved since she was a child. And there began a quest to learn as much as she could about her origins, her ethnicity, and how such a monumental secret could have been kept from her. She felt rage toward her mother, by then deceased, bewilderment about her ethnic identity, and, soon, an overpowering sense of anger and helplessness.

If you’ve had a DNA surprise, these feelings likely will be all too familiar, and Hay offers the much-needed comfort that comes from knowing that you’re not the only one whose ever had these experiences and emotions or the only one who doesn’t know which way to turn. She offers gentle guidance about the range of situations and complications that may arise, from how to communicate an NPE discovery to others, how to use DNA to search for family, how to communicate with new relatives, and how to contemplate and make a name change, as well as the steps needed to move forward. She addresses the emotional pitfalls, including isolation, loss, and grief, and the repercussions for others who are affected by an MPE’s discovery. In addition to noting helpful resources, Hay also advises readers about the need to carefully assess resources to determine if they are truly helpful, expert-based, and reputable.

Lisa gives me a warm hug, and I introduce her to Jenny. “This is my twin sister.”

Her eyes flick from Jenny to me several times. “Wow. You two really do look alike.”

Jenny laughs and glances over at me. “About a month ago, we learned through DNA testing that we’re identical.” This isn’t a setup. Jenny and I hadn’t planned on bringing this up today.

Tagging on to my sister’s comment, I’m conscious of keeping my voice free of accusation. “When we were adopted, Catholic Charities told my parents that we were fraternal twins. Perhaps you can shed light on how this mistake might have happened?”

A slight frown erases Lisa’s smile. “Before coming over here to meet you, I studied your file. Your birth mother did not deliver you here at St. Vincent’s but at a maternity hospital. Whatever information was sent over from the hospital is what would have been captured in the records. I’m sorry for the error, but I’m happy you found out the truth.” So there it is, an apology, leaving me with no one to blame.

Lisa’s perfectly arched eyebrows frame her blue-green eyes. Her smile reappears. “Since you’ve already viewed the old photographs down the hall, I’ll show you a few other areas, and then we can finish in the chapel.”

We follow Lisa to the old elevator. As she walks, the social worker gathers her long brown hair into one fist and then drops it behind her shoulders. I remember this habit of hers from the post-adoption support group meeting last month.

The format of the meeting was simple. After signing in, we went around the U-shaped conference table and stated our name, disclosed whether we were an adoptee, birth parent, or adoptive parent, and then we shared where we were in the search and reunion process. If we brought someone with us, we introduced them.

For the icebreaker piece, Lisa asked that we offer a response to this question: “If you could say one thing to the family member you seek, what would that be?”

It’s not hyperbole to say I’ve never seen a book quite like Megan Culhane Galbraith’s extraordinary hybrid work of creative nonfiction, The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book. Experimental in form and structure, it’s memoir, but at the same time a striking visual art project, an intellectual inquiry into the nature of memory, and a frightful window on the failures and brutalities of the American system of adoption.

While each aspect is equally compelling, the emotional heart of the book is the origin story of a girl who had three mothers before she was half a year old and the experience of the woman she grew to be, who, only during her own pregnancy, was overwhelmed by need to know her origin story and learn about her first mother.

It’s written in a powerful voice that can veer from playful to mournful and lingers on wonder and curiosity. The language at turns is discursive, fragmented, stream of conscious, and deeply thoughtful. Although Galbraith expresses a unique sensibility, adoptees and others who have yearned to know about their origins will see themselves here. The author’s meditations on the nature of identity, her compulsion toward self-erasure, and her fear of abandonment likely will resonate.

Here, the author shares an excerpt from this exceptional book, which will be released on May 21, 2021. You can support Indie booksellers and pre-order The Guild of the Infant Saviour at bookshop.org.

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

Are we better off forgetting the details?

I started writing this memoir as a way to process my mother’s death and remember the events surrounding it as they happened before coping mechanisms settled in to destroy the memories in order to protect me. But I haven’t yet been able to write about the actual moment of her death. I’ve been avoiding it. I’ve been avoiding reliving those moments because writing them down will make them real again in my mind and bring me one step closer to a breakdown.

My mother went out of this world like she came in. “The Red Menace,” as she was called by someone along the way—probably my father, made her own choice as to when to go. There was no peaceful exit, even though we were there, holding her hands and singing to her. A timebomb went off and simultaneously destroyed her body and my life. Perhaps that sounds dramatic, but I was simply not prepared for the devastation left in her wake or for the PTSD I experienced, like a soldier having returned from war.

I’ll be honest: I was a little worried about my mental health in the months after she died. I was able to cope better when I was with my brothers and sister. Maybe something about being together again reminded me that, in spite of the years apart and the distance between us, we are still a family. We grew up together and got on each other’s nerves as children (and still do now as adults). When we are together, I remember I am not just an interloper to their happy little trio. Nothing has changed.

Paul Kimball, a 58-year-old successful musician and actor, has wrestled throughout his life with feelings of abandonment after having been adopted. He was born to a young interracial couple, his father an Armenian immigrant from Iraq and his mother a professional cellist from California. His father wasn’t prepared to marry, and his mother may have been fearful of scandalizing her parents—this was the early 1960s, when having a baby out of wedlock was still taboo and interracial coupling still stigmatized—and they planned to abort the baby. It’s not clear what led to a change of heart, but they soon split up, and his mother relinquished Paul when he was one-week-old. He lived in foster care for the next four and a half months, and on his first birthday he was adopted by a loving couple.

To examine and give voice to his feelings, he’s written a memoir, We Are All Human Beings: An Adoptee Ponders. It’s an especially apt title because, like many adoptees, Kimball has more questions than answers. He explores the joys, heartbreaks, and complications of reuniting with his birth parents and grapples with the emotional consequences.

Here, he offers an excerpt, Chapter 12, which not only describes his initial connection with his birthmother, Wendy. It also expresses his passion for the cello, as evidenced by a tribute to the renowned cellist Jacqueline Du Pre. He wrote the tribute to Du Pre many years before he’d learned about his birthmother and before he’d discovered she, too, played the cello.

Searching for Mom, an award-winning memoir by Sara Easterly, pulls back the veil on adoption, revealing its harsher side—the primal wound that leaves a child desperate to feel worthy, to belong, to be good enough. Easterly was adopted at two days old, born to an adolescent girl coerced to relinquish her in a “grey-market” adoption. She had difficulty attaching to her adoptive mother and struggled with feelings of abandonment by her birthmother, which spurred an impossible quest for perfection, a crisis of faith and trust, and a battle with overwhelming emotions. She felt broken and cast off, unwanted. To protect her adoptive mother’s feelings, she suppressed her deep longing for and curiosity about her birthmother, putting her own needs and desires last to keep a peace, until finally, when she was nearly 40, she admitted her desire to search. Her adoptive mother reacted with a cocktail of emotions including fear, anger, and defensiveness. And then everything changed, when she revealed that in fact Sara had been wanted by her birth mother, causing Sara to reevaluate everything she’d come to believe. In Searching for Mom, Easterly traces her search for, and reunion with, her birthmother, the strain it placed on her relationship with her adoptive mother, and the complicated bond she shared with both women. More than a search tale, it’s a story about love, faith, and spiritual transformation. Here, the author shares an excerpt from her compelling memoir—its first chapter.

Award-winning journalist Mary Beth Sammons has collected the accounts of people who’ve explored their ancestry, whether through family history, genealogical research, ancestry travel, or DNA testing, and she’s discovered a common denominator among the ancestor seekers. Overwhelmingly, the storytellers find in the discovery and sharing of their stories an experience of healing, a greater sense of wholeness, and a broader understanding of the threads that run through all humanity.

In Ancestry Quest: How Stories from the Past Can Heal the Future, Sammons takes as her subject the growing phenomenon of DNA testing and the passion for genealogical research. She describes the quests of seekers in search of their lineages—their quests to solve known family mysteries, to grapple with unexpected revelations, or to look for knowledge with which to better understand their health. For many of these seekers, she writes, “this process has recast entire lives with surprises including shocking lineages, long-lost siblings, and family secrets that might have been buried for decades. For many, it has opened question about heritage, ethnicity, race, culture, and privacy.” And for others, she demonstrates, it validates both vague intuition and long-held suspicions.

Just over a decade ago, when autosomal DNA tests first hit the marketplace, offering consumers a new tool for advancing genealogical research and a way to discover genetic cousins, few imagined how popular these tests would become. In this short span, more than 26 million Americans have traded a hundred bucks and a spit or swab sample of DNA for a backward glimpse into their ancestry.

The majority of testers get precisely what they pay for—a pie chart indicating their ancestral heritage and a list of DNA cousin matches. They learn from whence and from whom they came—information that makes them feel better connected to their forbears and more knowledgeable about themselves in some essential way. Countless others, however, get much more than they bargain for and—sometimes—more than they can handle. For these consumers, DNA testing leads to a genetic disconnect from their families and the erasure of an entire swath of their self-knowledge. They discover that they’re genetically unrelated to one or more of their parents.

Even more shocking than the existence of these genetic disconnects is their sheer numbers. Although no one knows exactly how many testers have discovered misattributed parentage—and estimates within general population are likely overstated—headline after headline and the swelling ranks of secret Facebook groups devoted to supporting those disenfranchised from their families suggests the numbers are significant.

Many of us are preoccupied with the question “Who’s your daddy?” and pin our hopes on science—a DNA test—to provide clarity. According to Nara B. Milanich, author of “Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father,” the question has been asked for millennia, but it wasn’t until the early 20th century that people looked to science rather than society for the answer. And while the conundrum has been debated through the ages and far and wide, it’s a far more complex matter than it appears to be, the author argues. Despite science, she insists, there’s still no consensus about who is a father or what it means to be a father.

While the need to pinpoint paternity has been driven for various reasons throughout history by a variety of stakeholders—mothers, putative fathers, potential heirs, lawyers, champions of eugenics—there are modern twists. “The orphaned and the adopted have asked this question in relation to lost identities,” says Milanich. “More recently, assisted reproductive technologies—gamete donation, surrogacy—have raised old issue in new ways.”

A professor of history at Barnard College, the author traces the history of the understanding of paternity across time and cultures and analyzes the many ways fatherhood is defined—socially, legally, politically, and biologically—and explores the consequences and implications of the different means of establishing paternity, which, she observes, bequeaths not only one’s name but also identity, nationality, and legitimacy.

When he was only 25 years old and working as a speechwriter for Barack Obama, Adam Frankel learned a searing truth about himself—one his mother intended him to live his days without knowing.

Secrets, he says, were “something of a family tradition.” His mother, who suffered from an ill-defined mental illness and who at least once tried to take her own life, refused in his youth to tell him why she and his father divorced before he was five years old.  As an adult, he pushed back on his mother’s reluctance to share this family history, until finally the truth came out: his dad was not his biological father.

“I wanted to climb out of my skin,” he recalls. “I felt disembodied. I looked down at my legs, arms, hands. All of it suddenly felt so unfamiliar, like I was inhabiting a stranger’s body.” He was, in that instant, “undone.”

“The Survivors: A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing” traces Frankel’s agonizing quest to find and come to terms with his truth—to heal what he describes as a rupture in his heart.

It’s surely not hyperbole to say that “A Broken Tree: How DNA Exposed a Family’s Secrets”—a new book by Stephen F. Anderson—is the mother of all NPE (not parent expected) stories. It’s hard to imagine a more epic or stranger-than-fiction tale of misattributed parentage than this.

Anderson stared down a series of family mysteries and over decades employed DNA and oral history in an attempt to solve them. He describes his family of nine children as nothing like the “Leave it to Beaver” family he grew up watching on television. He knew his was different, but it took decades to learn just how different.

Because his mother, Linda, had little interest in settling down to raise kids and clean houses, and his father, Mark, a fire truck salesman, was on the road a great deal of the time, his older sisters took on much of the burden of caring for the younger children. There were rumors and whispers among the siblings of family secrets, but they were too disjointed and fragmentary to be understood. He turned to the person he most expected to have answers, but was rebuffed. He visited his oldest sister, Holly, to record stories about the family, and she refused to share a single recollection.

Author Dani Shapiro has explored family secrets from every angle in an exceptional decades-long writing career that until now yielded five novels and four memoirs. Revisiting those works, it’s tempting to believe everything she’s experienced and written has been prelude to her 10th book, the bestselling “Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love.” In an earlier memoir, for example, “Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life,” she describes herself in childhood as having been strangely aware unknowns were waiting to be discovered.