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Severance Magazine

Short Takes: Books

    Short TakesShort Takes: Books

    American Bastard

    by bkjax April 20, 2022

    Jan Beatty’s American Bastard, winner of the 2019 Red Hen Nonfiction Award, is a blistering, take no prisoners account of adoption that may leave non-adoptees astonished and many adoptees shaking their heads in recognition.

    A domestic adoptee from the Baby Scoop Era, Beatty was born in the Roselia Asylum and Maternity Hospital in Pittsburgh, adopted into a working-class family, and told when she was young that she’d been adopted. She writes about the emotional life of an adopted child—the longing, yearning, the feeling of erasure and brokenness—and her fractured encounters with the birth parents she discovered after years battling the bureaucratic gatekeepers of adoption information.

    Beatty’s lyrical prose sparks like a live wire. For anyone taken from a parent, her words will resonate, at times landing like a punch to the gut and other times like a balm. Adoptees will feel seen, and those who were not adopted may see adoptees for the first time after reading the memoir.

    American Bastard punctures the rose-colored vision of adoption that poses the practice as a strategy for social betterment. In its place she offers the reality: “I had assembled huge walls of protection over the years as a way to stay alive. An adoptee needs to have a strategy from a young age, whether conscious or not—a way to manage this hole of abandonment, loss, and grief. It’s too much for a child to handle. The loss of identity, the complete erasure of history, the floating in the world without a name. The original loss of being taken from the mother at birth, and then the adoptive parents pretending that they are your parents. The primary lifelong trauma.”

    Beatty blasts away the whitewashed fantasy that casts adopters as saviors and children as rescued. She offers an unflinching picture of the damage adoption can inflict, the lifelong pain of abandonment it leaves in its wake, the lies and the effacement of identity.  She shatters the myths from the very first page, slaying every erroneous belief held by those who think they know what adoption is. “Maybe you are saying, ‘I’ve felt that way—I always thought I was adopted.’ Please, let me stop you. You weren’t.” She disintegrates argument after argument, makes sawdust of all the well-meaning responses adoptees hear all their lives, like those from people who think they understand because their mothers died when they were young. To one after another she says, “Please, let me stop you.” And sets the reader straight. “This is not about measuring sorrow. But this one’s about you—how you can’t seem to imagine, not even for a second, how it might be for someone who doesn’t know who they are—without boomeranging back to your own life. Try it. Try staying with the foreign idea that a baby is born, then sold to another person. Stay with it. There is the physical trauma of the broken bond. There is the erasure of the baby’s entire history. There are these hands that have a different smell, a different DNA—reaching for the baby, calling it theirs. Stay with that for a while. No talking.”

    It’s devastating right from the start. And Beatty, in a letter to adopters, offers this brutal assessment—a startling, uncomfortable, and wholly welcome honesty: “What are you thinking? That you could tie it all up with a bow? You’ve erased a baby human to make yourself happy, to fill a hole, to do a good deed—at least own it: it’s for you.”

    In no way a traditional memoir, Beatty’s poetic account mixes lyricism, essayistic rambling, fantasy, and stream of consciousness. It drifts back and forth across time and space, circling its subjects, diverting, and circling back. It breaks down, comes apart, and weaves back together. In a structure like no other, it dips and drops readers into the center of scenes and makes them work to get their balance. At times her words seem to dance on a knife’s edge—language that’s painful and raw and beautiful and ugly and insists on every page that you do not look away.

    —BKJ

    April 20, 2022 2 comments
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  • Short TakesShort Takes: Books

    Surviving the White Gaze

    by bkjax April 1, 2022
    April 1, 2022

    Rebecca Carroll, author, cultural critical, and podcast host, was adopted at birth by a white couple and raised in a predominantly white community in rural New Hampshire, where, as the only black resident, she’d see no one who looked like her until she was six years old. Her father was a high-school art teacher and her biological mother, Tess, had been one of his students. When Tess became pregnant by her older boyfriend who lived in Boston, the teacher and his wife adopted her daughter. Growing up in this white family in this white community, she had no touchstone for what it meant to be black, no mirror of her own blackness to reflect and illuminate who she was. And worse, no one cared. Her only point of reference as a child was Easy Reader from The Electric Company, whom she fantasized was her father. When she first encountered a black person in real life—her ballet teacher—she wondered, “Did she know Easy Reader from The Electric Company? Did she go home at night to live inside the TV with him and the words and letters he carried around with him in the pockets of his jacket?” As she grew older, Carroll was aware of being seen by this teacher in a way her parents did not, yet she was also aware of the differences. “I felt small pangs of fragile awareness regarding who I might be, what my skin color might mean. There were days when I wanted to be, or believed I was, black just like Mrs. Rowland, but it also seemed as though I would have to give something up in order for that to remain true.” She was increasingly aware that unlike her teacher, she moved through the world with the “benefits afforded by white stewardship.” As a transracial adoptee, Carroll had to hurdle barrier after barrier merely to become authentically who she was always meant to be. And considering that the most formidable obstacle to her ability to truly recognize and finally claim her identity as a black woman was her family—both her adoptive parents and her white birthmother—it was an extraordinarily lonely struggle carried out by a force of one. How, isolated in an overwhelmingly white world, could she know what it meant to be black? While Carroll’s adoptive parents were largely oblivious to her need to understand, absorb, and assert her racial identity, her birthmother, Tess, aggressively denied her daughter’s racial and cultural heritage. When they began a relationship, 11-year-old Carroll was curious about and soon enamored of her mother, but learned there was a cost to the relationship. She carried that burden for a long time, making excuses and ignoring her intuition as her birthmother did everything possible to torpedo her growing attempt to construct an understanding of herself as a black woman—gaslighting her, subjecting her to blatantly racist comments, and effectively dispossessing her of the right to her own blackness. She straddled two worlds, ill-fitting in one and made to feel like an imposter in the other.

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  • Short Takes: Books

    Body Work

    by bkjax March 15, 2022
    March 15, 2022

    In Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, prolific essayist Melissa Febos, author of the memoir Whip Smart; Abandon Me; and the bestselling essay collection Girlhood, blends memoir with insight and guidance about the art of writing, primarily for an audience of memoirists. Why highlight a book about the craft of writing in a magazine for adoptees, donor conceived people, and others who’ve experienced misattributed parentage? What does it have to do with you? Possibly everything. You needn’t be a writer to be inspired and educated by Body Work. The author’s razor-sharp insights are pertinent to anyone who wants to excavate their own truths; interrogate their traumas and their shame; and, especially, take ownership of their narratives. To be adoptees or NPEs* means that part of our stories—the most foundational parts—were taken from us before we could ever know them. They were stolen for a host of reasons, but typically to keep others from facing uncomfortable truths—a theft that not only deflected shame from them but projected it onto us, suggesting that we are its source. Secrets were kept from us, and our stories were rewritten to better fit others’ narratives and preserve their integrity at the expense of our own. Our stories may be hidden behind closed doors, guarded by gatekeepers who insist we have no right to try to open them. If we persist and manage to unlock the doors, those for whom secrecy was in their best interest may tell us that what we discover is not ours to share. Sometimes we tell ourselves these lies.

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http://www.reckoningwiththeprimalwound.com

What’s New on Severance

  • There Was a Secret
  • Should Health Care Professionals Tell the Truth About Paternity?
  • 20 Questions and a World of Stories
  • The Wizard and I
  • Rabbit Holes and Hobbits
  • We Three

After a DNA Surprise: 10 Things No One Wants to Hear

https://www.righttoknow.us

Call Right To Know’s resource hotline to talk with another MPE be paired with a mentor, get resources, or just talk.

Original Birth Certificates to California Born Adoptees

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erHylYLHqXg&t=4s

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Recommended Reading

The Lost Family: How DNA is Upending Who We Are, by Libby Copeland. Check our News & Reviews section for a review of this excellent book about the impact on the culture of direct-to-consumer DNA testing.

What Happens When Parents Wait to Tell a Child He’s Adopted

“A new study suggests that learning about one’s adoption after a certain age could lead to lower life satisfaction in the future.”

Janine Vance Searches for the Truth About Korean Adoptees

“Imagine for a minute that you don’t know who your mother is. Now imagine that you are that mother, and you don’t know what became of your daughter.”

Who’s Your Daddy? The Twisty History of Paternity Testing

“Salon talks to author Nara B. Milanich about why in the politics of paternity and science, context is everything.”

What Separation from Parents Does to Children: ‘The Effect is Catastrophic”

“This is what happens inside children when they are forcibly separated from their parents.”

Truth: A Love Story

“A scientist discovers his own family’s secret.”

Dear Therapist: The Child My Daughter Put Up for Adoption is Now Rejecting Her

“She thought that her daughter would want to meet her one day. Twenty-five years later, that’s not true.”

I’m Adopted and Pro-Choice. Stop Using My Story for the Anti-Abortion Agenda. Stephanie Drenka’s essay for the Huffington Post looks at the way adoptees have made unwilling participants in conversations about abortion.

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@2019 - Severance Magazine

Severance Magazine
  • About
    • About Severance
    • From the Editor
    • Submission Guidelines: How to Contribute
    • Contact Us
  • Articles
    • abandonment
    • Adoption
    • Advocacy
    • DNA & Genetic Genealogy
    • DNA Surprises
    • Donor Conception
    • Family Secrets
    • Genetics & Heredity
    • Interviews & Profiles
    • Late Discovery Adoptees
    • Psychology & Therapy
    • NPEs/MPEs
    • Search & Reunion
  • Essays & Fiction
    • abandonment
    • Adoption
    • DNA surprises
    • Donor Conception
    • NPEs/MPEs
    • Late Discovery Adoptees
    • Search & Reunion
    • Secrets & Lies
  • Short Takes
    • Short Takes: Books
    • Short Takes: Film & Video
    • Short Takes: People, News & Research
    • Short Takes: Podcasts & Radio
  • Self Care & Coping
    • Coping Strategies
    • Self-Care
  • Speak Out
    • Micro-Memoirs
    • Your Video Stories
  • Resources
    • Start Here
    • Abandonment
    • Adoption
    • DNA & Genetic Genealogy
    • Donor Conception
    • Genetics & Heredity
    • Late-Discovery Adoptees
    • NPEs (Not parent expected) & MPEs (Misattributed parentage experience)
    • Psychology & Therapy & Coaching
    • Search & Reunion
    • Secrets & Lies
    • Self-Care
Severance Magazine
  • About
    • About Severance
    • From the Editor
    • Submission Guidelines: How to Contribute
    • Contact Us
  • Articles
    • abandonment
    • Adoption
    • Advocacy
    • DNA & Genetic Genealogy
    • DNA Surprises
    • Donor Conception
    • Family Secrets
    • Genetics & Heredity
    • Interviews & Profiles
    • Late Discovery Adoptees
    • Psychology & Therapy
    • NPEs/MPEs
    • Search & Reunion
  • Essays & Fiction
    • abandonment
    • Adoption
    • DNA surprises
    • Donor Conception
    • NPEs/MPEs
    • Late Discovery Adoptees
    • Search & Reunion
    • Secrets & Lies
  • Short Takes
    • Short Takes: Books
    • Short Takes: Film & Video
    • Short Takes: People, News & Research
    • Short Takes: Podcasts & Radio
  • Self Care & Coping
    • Coping Strategies
    • Self-Care
  • Speak Out
    • Micro-Memoirs
    • Your Video Stories
  • Resources
    • Start Here
    • Abandonment
    • Adoption
    • DNA & Genetic Genealogy
    • Donor Conception
    • Genetics & Heredity
    • Late-Discovery Adoptees
    • NPEs (Not parent expected) & MPEs (Misattributed parentage experience)
    • Psychology & Therapy & Coaching
    • Search & Reunion
    • Secrets & Lies
    • Self-Care
@2019 - Severance Magazine