Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation, by Daniel Groll, is a fascinating exploration of attitudes about whether donor offspring are entitled to knowledge of their donors, but the issues and questions it raises are pertinent to adoptees and NPEs/MPEs as well. Comprehensive and academic in approach, it may be challenging to readers not well-versed in philosophical discourse, but it’s key reading for anyone with a stake in the debate over access to genetic knowledge. And although Groll ultimately stands against anonymity in donor conception, some NPEs and MPEs may take exception to some of the arguments that led him there. Therefore, we asked him to address some of those arguments, and he readily agreed.Severance was the target of a critical article last year in a publication called Real Life that accused it of numerous transgressions, including promoting bionormativity. It insisted that the magazine’s content poses genetic family as measured by DNA as “the norm against which all forms of family should be judged.” It further states that if we view the genetic family as something from which one can be severed, non-genetic family “will inevitably be understood as secondary, extraneous, and even pathological.” Additionally, it charges that those of us looking for genetic information are indicating that “biogenetic kinship is the most true, essential, and valid form of family” and that such a belief places queer families in “legally precarious positions but undermines the larger value of ‘love makes a family’ for all families.” The argument rejects the idea that there can be a desire to know one’s genetic history that is apolitical. Clearly, I don’t believe Severance makes any such assertions, and based on having heard hundreds of stories and experiences, it’s obvious that most of us grew up with non-genetic families. I, for example, was raised by a man who was not my father. He was my family. I didn’t wish to have another father, but I did wish to know who my biological father was. I didn’t imagine my biological family would be a better family, or a more real family. I simply wished, as I believe most people who lack this information do, to know from whom I got my genes. My question is, how does simply wanting that information valorize traditional families or diminish nontraditional families?

Before I answer this, I just want to explain my connection to the issue of donor conception since people inevitably wonder about it. I am a known donor to close friends who have two children. The children know both who and what I am in relation to them. Our families are in regular contact. From the get-go, everyone agreed there would be no secrets and that we all need to be open to how their children understand their experience and let that guide us. Maybe the fact that I’m a donor will cause some of your readers to stop reading, but I hope not.

On to your question! One thing I want to make clear is that I think people who create children with donated gametes should not use an anonymous donor. So I am totally with you: I don’t think that wanting genetic knowledge—as I call it—necessarily or always or even usually valorizes traditional families or diminishes nontraditional families. One thing I try to do in my book is to make exactly this case. There are really good reasons for taking people’s desire for genetic knowledge seriously without committing ourselves to the view (which I don’t subscribe to) that biological parents are normally the best parents or that the traditional family form—of a man and woman and children that are genetically related to both parents—is somehow the best kind of family.

Having said that, I think it’s worth taking seriously the idea that an interest in genetic knowledge is not apolitical, if that means that it floats free from, or exists independently of, the contingent cultural norms, practices. and institutions that shape our desires. I want to be really clear: this isn’t a point about the desire for genetic knowledge in particular. Rather, I don’t think we should see any desire as obviously apolitical. Even what we might think of as our most basic desires—for sustenance or for social connection—take the particular forms they do as a result of the culture they are embedded in. We might put it this way: all of our desires are filtered through, or suffused with, the culture (the norms, the values, the practices) they are located in.

As a result, I think it is always worthwhile to ask two questions about our wants, desires. and interests: 1. “In what ways have they been shaped by our cultural milieu?” and 2. “Is that shaping a good or a bad thing?” In the book, I talk about certain gendered desires – like, for example, a boy’s desire to not cry in front of his friends—as examples of desires that are a) clearly shaped by our cultural milieu and b) a bad thing.

Now, I don’t think the desire for genetic knowledge is like that. I’ve already said that I think we should take people’s desire for genetic knowledge seriously and that doing so leads to the conclusion that people shouldn’t use anonymous donors. But I think it’s undeniable that we live in a culture that highly valorizes genetic connectedness and often tells simplistic, reductive stories about family resemblance, genetic ties, the significance of “blood” etc. I think it’s worthwhile for everyone—not just donor conceived people or others who lack genetic knowledge—to interrogate their commitments about the significance of genetic ties in light of the culture we’re in. We should all ask, “Why do I, or do people in general, care about this so much?” and “Is it a good thing or a bad thing?” I try to give an account in the book about why many people care about genetic knowledge in a way that shows how it can be a source of meaning. But I also try to show that, oftentimes, people’s reasons for being attached to genetic knowledge are shaped by forces that do unjustifiably valorize the biogenetic conception of the family.

Why can’t I uphold the rights of people who wish to create nontraditional families and still want my genetic information? Why is it an either/or? Why is it not acceptable to honor and uphold nontraditional families and at the same time say that genetic knowledge also matters?

I think it is acceptable! Indeed, that’s the position I try to carve out in the book: we shouldn’t see the interest in genetic knowledge as ineluctably bound up with biogenetic normativity. One can do exactly what you say: honor and uphold nontraditional families and at the same time say that genetic knowledge matters.

A problem emerges, however, when people put an emphasis on the significance of genetic knowledge—and genetic ties— that automatically downgrades the status of non-traditional families to “second best.” I’ve seen this attitude on display in a number of contexts. Sometimes the idea is that someone who isn’t raised by their genetic parents is (usually, though not always) worse off for it. Sometimes the idea is that a life without genetic knowledge is necessarily and seriously deficient. Sometimes the idea is that contributing gametes for the purposes of procreation without the intention of raising the resulting child is, by itself, morally unacceptable (equivalent, perhaps, to abandoning one’s child). I take all of those ideas to downgrade—if not outright reject—non-traditional family forms. So to the extent people’s attachment to genetic knowledge goes through those ideas, then I think there is a tension between caring about genetic knowledge and honoring non-traditional family forms. But again, I have no objections whatsoever to your way of thinking about things.

It seems that the objection to wanting genetic knowledge asserted by some individuals creating nontraditional families has to do with the fear that their children will be somehow less connected or see their parents as somehow less than traditional parents when I believe there’s no research or even anecdotal experience to suggest that is true. Is that right?

I think you’re right. Certainly, parents who do not want their donor conceived children to know that they are donor conceived sometimes cite as the reason that they’re worried the child will be less connected to their non-genetic parent. One thing seems clear: when people find out later in life they are donor conceived, that very often does cause a rupture. But the issue there seems to be mostly about secrecy and deception, and not about the fact of genetic non-relatedness itself. As far as I know, there is no evidence that people who are donor conceived and have never been led to believe otherwise are generally less connected to their non-genetic parent. Part of the issue here, though, is that we would need a better of understanding of what “less connected” even means. One thing I would definitely want to reject is that “being connected” is a zero-sum game so that if a donor conceived person forms a connection to their donor they are thereby less connected to their social parents.

It’s important to note here that it’s only some families that can realistically keep their donor conceived child in the dark, namely heteronormative families that can “pass” as “traditional” families (i.e. families where children are genetically related to both parents). I think doing so is, generally speaking, deceptive and wrong. I think oftentimes a parent’s worry that their child will not connect to them in the same way if they (the child) know they are donor conceived reflects the parent’s own preconceptions about the significance of genetic ties as well as, sometimes, shame about not being able to conceive (particularly for men).

At some point in Conceiving People you say that people can be influenced or educated to believe that genetic history is not as significant as some would have us believe. There seems to be no evidence to assert that genetic information is unimportant. On what basis can that claim be made?

This is a great question. One thing to say up front: clearly genetic information can be super important for medical reasons. I do not want to deny that! Nor do I want to suggest that we should try to “educate” people to believe otherwise. But the medical reasons for wanting genetic knowledge are not—for many donor conceived people—the whole story: if it were possible to get the relevant medical information without knowing who your genetic parents are, many donor conceived people would still want to know who their genetic parents are. So, when I suggest that maybe we can move people toward caring less about genetic knowledge, I don’t mean that people should care less about the medical reasons for wanting genetic knowledge. I mean, rather, that perhaps people can be moved to care less about genetic knowledge for the reasons that go beyond the medical reasons.

What do I mean when I say that perhaps people can be “moved” in this way? To answer this question, let me lay out one key idea I argue for: while genetic knowledge can provide a rich source of meaning in answering the question “Who am I?”, I don’t think it is either the only source or a necessary source. I think there are ways of telling a rich and truly complete story about who you are as a person that doesn’t put a lot of emphasis on genetic lineage. Now combine that thought with one I discussed above, namely that we live in a society that puts a lot of emphasis (in my view, undue emphasis) on the significance of genetic ties. These two thoughts together suggest one way that we might move people—everyone!—to care less about genetic knowledge, namely by working to make society less bionormative overall, where that means we try to change our cultural schema so that lacking genetic knowledge isn’t necessarily seen as having this massive void in one’s life. That’s a tall order (as are all calls to effect change at a societal level). I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about how to go about doing that.

At the individual level, one thing I say in the book is that people have a choice about how to construct their identities, about what parts of their life to treat as important and which to treat as comparatively unimportant. In retrospect, I would have not put things in terms of “choice” because I don’t think it’s really possible to just make up your mind to either care or not care about something. What I was trying to convey is that I don’t think there is a fact of the matter about who we, as individuals, are. There’s not a single answer to the question “Who am I?” out there, waiting to be discovered. Rather, there are many different rich, full answers to that question and not all of the answers require having genetic knowledge. So, it’s not about “educating” people, but rather creating a culture, a climate, where there is less pressure—from all avenues of life —to pursue what I call the “genetic route” to answering the question, “Who am I?”

Crucially, I think one of the ironies here is that insisting that genetic knowledge doesn’t matter at all or withholding information from people is not the way to create that climate. Quite the opposite: I think practices of secrecy and anonymity function to heighten the perceived significance of genetic ties. I think honesty and an openness to what the philosopher Alice MacLachlan calls the “abundant family”—a notion of family that extends beyond the typical notion parents and children—are more likely, over time, to put genetic knowledge in its proper place as a source of identity determination, but not an absolutely necessary source.

What about truth? How can wanting to know truth be dismissed as somehow unethical or immoral? How can truth be immoral? Couldn’t it reasonably be argued that trying to deprive someone of their birthright—of information most other humans have—is deceptive and unethical or immoral?

Let me tackle the second question first! I think it is indeed deceptive and, generally speaking, unethical to not tell a donor conceived person that they are donor conceived. What about not giving people access to genetic knowledge by, for example, using an anonymous donor? The central argument of the book is that that too is, in general, unethical (I wouldn’t call it deceptive, though, unless it’s paired with non-disclosure).

I’ve almost answered your second question, but not quite, because you put things in terms of people having a “birthright” to genetic knowledge and I didn’t use that term in my answer. I don’t use the language of “birthright” for two reasons. First, just as a philosophical matter, I’m not entirely sure what I think about natural rights in general, so my thinking just doesn’t tend to run in the direction of explanations that appeal to natural rights. But even if it did, I think it’s well worth asking what makes something a right in the first place. In other words, I’m not satisfied with saying, “Well, it is my right to have this information and there’s nothing more to be said.” I think rights call for explanations, so even if I did want to put things in terms of rights, I would still want to go on to do all the stuff I do to explain what gives rise to the right.

Your first question—about whether truth, or wanting the truth, can ever be immoral—is super interesting. I don’t think truth, as such, is either moral or immoral. It’s just the truth! Facts are neither moral nor immoral. But I think that wanting the truth can be immoral. Suppose I want to know some embarrassing fact about you so that I can blackmail you. My wanting the truth, in that case, would be immoral.

Now, wanting genetic knowledge is not at all like that. I’m just giving a case where it seems pretty clear that wanting the truth can be immoral. My point is just that if someone wants to defend the right to genetic knowledge, it’s probably not best to make that case by claiming that it is never wrong to want the truth. We need to know why people want the truth…and that returns us to some of what we discussed about interrogating the source of the desire for genetic knowledge.

Who benefits and how do they benefit by wanting to discourage the gaining of this information?

This is a great question, and it’s not one I take up in the book, at least not in detail. I think there are four broad communities that benefit from practices of anonymity. The first community is heteronormative parents who want to pass as a “traditional” family and don’t want anyone—least of all their child—to know that they have a donor conceived child. I think this interest is often born out of a sense of shame about being unable to conceive, combined with the kinds of worries you mentioned above (e.g. that a child who knows they are not genetically related to one of their parents will, as a result, love them less).

The second community is non-heteronormative families—gay and lesbian couples for example—whose status as parents has been, and to some extent still is, legally and socially tenuous. Living with the prospect that the donor might swoop in and claim parental rights—and that the law might side with the donor —is profoundly unsettling. A friend of mine describes it as living with a feeling of “terror,” and recent developments in the legal landscape in the United States—like the recently “Don’t Say Gay” law passed in Florida, the legal attacks across the country on reproductive rights, and the legal attacks in some states on trans people—show that that feeling is not remotely unfounded. I think those of us that have not lived with the prospect of having your family torn asunder—or your whole identity targeted—by the law can have trouble understanding the force of this concern. It’s understandable—to put it mildly—why, in that context, people might care that the donor is anonymous.

The third community, of course, is the fertility industry which has a massive interest in ensuring a supply of donors and avoiding limits on how many offspring can be conceived with the gametes of one donor.

The fourth are prospective donors who donate to make money and also to help people who cannot conceive, but do not want any involvement at all with their genetic offspring.

How much should we care about these interests? Let me start with the fertility industry. I am not an expert on the fertility industry (and, I’ll add, I have absolutely nothing to do with it), but I have little-to-no sympathy with their set of concerns. The same goes for prospective donors who want to be anonymous—I argue in the book if you’re going to donate, you shouldn’t be an anonymous donor. I can understand, of course, why a donor would want to be anonymous. But I argue that those interests really don’t count for much at all.

I am, however, sensitive to the interests and concerns of the first two groups I mentioned. Crucially, I don’t think such concerns win the day. In the book, I consider why prospective parents may prefer to use an anonymous donor and—while I understand where those preferences come from—I find them wanting when compared to a donor conceived person’s interest in having genetic knowledge.

I’ll also add that I think I think the best way to address the legitimate concerns of the first two communities is not by upholding practices of anonymity—which, as we all know, are increasingly impossible to uphold in the world of 23andMe etc.—but rather to transform the cultural norms and beliefs about the nature of families so that, for example, infertility is not a source of shame, the bionormative family is not seen as the “gold standard” (to borrow a phrase from Charlotte Witt) of family forms, and the law provides protections for non-traditional family forms.

You stop short in your book of weighing in on the right to know. Could you look at this and comment not as a philosopher but as a person with curiosity. Reverence for ancestors has been communicated since the beginning of time. Genealogy is the world’s leading hobby. People have always and will continue to want to know where they come from. If the vast majority of people in the world, now and apparently in all time and all cultures, were able to know who their parents are and that knowledge mattered to them, is it reasonable to think it isn’t a problem for those of us who are deprived of that information? Perhaps reduce it to an absurd point. Say, bread isn’t necessary for life, but if 95% of the people in the world want bread and are allowed to have it and you can’t have bread, wouldn’t you be upset, and might you not wonder why you are not entitled to have bread, even if it weren’t vital to your life? Why are all the philosophical arguments you construct necessary if, as the studies you cite suggest, the majority of donor conceived people feel that genetic information matters? Why is their lived experience not enough to demonstrate that, for whatever reason, they feel impoverished by not having the same genetic information others have?

I want to reject the dichotomy between looking at things as a philosopher and looking at them as a person with curiosity! For me, philosophy is all about being curious and trying to get to the heart of things. To be sure, I don’t think it is the only or the best way to be curious or to get at the heart of things: music, poetry, art, fiction, creative non-fiction, not to mention all the other academic fields of study, are also conduits for curiosity and thinking things through. Philosophy is just one way. But it’s a way that speaks to me. There’s not “Philosophy me” and “Here’s what I really think me.” It’s all just me!

So, when I consider your fantastic questions as a person with curiosity, I unavoidably take up a philosophical perspective. And when I do, it seems to me that it’s not enough to note that lots of people want something in order to conclude that they should have it or are entitled to it. Now: it’s definitely relevant. Indeed, my whole argument against anonymity is centered on the fact that the majority of donor conceived people want genetic knowledge. But—at the risk of sounding like a broken record—I think all desires, all wants, are candidates for critical scrutiny. We should scrutinize the forces that generate the wants, desires, interests, and aims that people have. Sometimes we’ll see that the forces are benign or even positive. Other times we’ll discover that they’re not positive. And still other times, we’ll discover that it’s a mix.

The point is just that we shouldn’t treat people’s desires, interests, or aims as beyond scrutiny and as the thing that settles the matter of what people should have or be entitled to. We need an account of what is behind the interests, desires, etc. I try to provide such an account when it comes to the desire for genetic knowledge—among the population at large, not just among donor conceived people. And I try to show that even if certain problematic cultural forces are in play, the desire for genetic knowledge is nonetheless worthwhile and should be respected. Anyway: that’s why I spill so much ink on this topic.Daniel Groll is an associate professor in the philosophy Department at Carleton College in Northfield, MN and an affiliate faculty member at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota. He writes on a variety of issues in ethics and is currently spending time thinking about the nature and significance of family resemblance. When he’s not doing philosophy, he’s probably making music for kids with Louis & Dan and the Invisible Band. Get a 30% discount on Conceiving People with the code AAFLYG. Find him on Twitter @dang_pigeon.

Rebecca Carroll, author, cultural critic, 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. Growing up among her white relatives and white townspeople, she had no touchstone for what it meant to be black, no mirror of her own blackness to reflect and illuminate who she really was. And worse, no one cared. Her only point of reference as a child was the character 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, Mrs. Rowland—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 who she was always meant to be. And considering that the most formidable obstacle to her ability to truly recognize and finally claim her authentic 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 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.

All adoptees are stripped of their histories and their genetic information, but in her powerful memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, Carroll shines a light on this additional theft of something equally fundamental—racial identity—and details the painful journey to take back what should always have been hers.

When she was writing the memoir, one the few black students she taught at an all-girls private school wrote to tell her what she meant to her. “This,” Carroll writes, “is what black folks are to one another—we are the light that affirms and illuminates ourselves to ourselves. A light that shines in its reflection of unbound blackness, brighter and beyond the white gaze. The path to fully understanding this, and my ultimate arrival at the complicated depths of my own blackness, was a decades-long, self-initiated rite of passage, wherein I both sought out and pushed away my reflection, listened to the wrong people, and harbored an overwhelming sense of convoluted grief—a grief that guided me here, to myself.”

In this moving coming of age story, Carroll illustrates the cost of feeling unseen, of being disregarded, not only by the community but by those closest to her who thwarted her at every turn. She pulls no punches, squarely placing the blame where it belongs, on everyone who failed her again and again. It’s the story of pride and persistence, of hard-won healing and redemption.—BKJ

In 1995, when Peter J. Boni’s mother experienced a stroke after open heart surgery, the walls she’d built to hold back a secret for nearly half a century crumbled. In rehab, she began to tell visitors what she never told him—that his father wasn’t his father, that he’d been donor conceived. And so began a quest to learn the truth of his origins and the nature of the societal forces that led to the circumstances of his birth—the subject of his new book, Uprooted: Family Trauma, Unknown Origins and the Secretive History of Artificial Insemination.

Roughly halfway through his narrative Boni says, “Never doubt my resolve.” But his dogged determination is evident from the first page. Early on, it’s clear that after serving as a US Army Special Operations Team Leader in Vietnam, he was the go-to guy in his business sphere, where he was a successful high-tech CEO/entrepreneur/venture capitalist and more—and he tore into his personal mystery with the same can-do attitude—a tenacity that fueled him through the 22 years it took to solve the puzzle of his parentage.

Uprooted is comprised of four parts that add up to exceptional storytelling. It’s compelling memoir of a troubled childhood with an unwell father, a determination to succeed, and the challenges of grappling with the emotional fallout of his family’s secrets. It’s also an exhaustive and insightful account of the history of assisted reproductive technology; a cogent indictment of the flaws of the largely unregulated, multi-billion-dollar industry; and a rallying cry for advocacy with a prescription for change.

Boni’s scope is ambitious and he succeeds on every level. Donor conceived people will see themselves reflected in his moving testimony about the consequences and repercussions of the inconvenient truth of donor conception. Many will feel seen and heard as he describes genealogical bewilderment and the roiling emotions aroused by the revelation of family secrets, the shattering of comfortable notions of identity, and the lack of knowledge about his genetic information. It’s a must-read not only for donor conceived people but also for donors and recipient parents as well as fertility practitioners, lawmakers, behavioral health providers, and anyone contemplating creating a family through assisted reproduction. While the actors in a deeply flawed industry who are motivated solely by profit aren’t likely to be swayed by Boni’s arguments or embrace his suggested reforms, Uprooted may fuel a wildfire of advocacy that has the potential to give rise to meaningful legislation, transparency and accountability, and a true cultural shift.Let’s talk about language. With respect to people affected by misattributed parentage, I’m increasingly interested in the words we use about ourselves and our experiences and the words others use about us. You use the words bastard and illegitimate, mostly in the context of the history of donor conception and when discussing the societal and legal ramifications. What are your feelings about each of these words? Do you find them offensive or descriptive or neutral?

Yes, “illegitimate” and “bastard” are emotionally charged and offensive words by today’s standards, aren’t they! I wanted to share the emotional connotation of those words with the reader. I felt rather outraged by the label. To defend myself, I intellectualized it. In my research for my origins, I needed to understand the societal backdrop that fueled my parents’ decision to conceive me in such stealth via an anonymous sperm donor.

Those words were so descriptive of the then prevailing attitudes fostered by Church and State, which had evolved over centuries. A Time article, dated February 26, 1945 (near the time of my conception), amplified that backdrop. It had recapped a ruling in Superior Court on the legal status of a donor conceived child. In the eyes of the court, the wife had committed adultery, the husband was granted a divorce on those grounds, and the child was deemed “illegitimate.” The articled was titled “Artificial Bastards?” Yes, that was with a question mark. Those attitudes contributed to driving the donor insemination practice underground. My parents’ fertility practitioner coached them on how to make me look “legitimate.” They were instructed to take their closely held secret to the grave.

I used “Artificial Bastard” as the working title for my book during its early drafting (retitled Uprooted, with help from my publisher). No neutrality on my part. It was personal.

Early on and throughout much of the book, instead of referring to your biological father, you’ve referred to your “paternal seed.” I don’t believe you ever referred to your donor as your father, biological or otherwise. Why did you choose that word and what did that choice mean to you? And when speaking with your sister, you referred to “her father,” “her brother.” What went into the choice of words here?

For me, my dad may not have been biological, but I was fortunate; he wanted to be a dad and was terrific at it. He gave me absolutely no indication that he was anything other than my genetic father. Discovering 33 years after his death that our relationship wasn’t genetic actually magnified my reverence for him. It also rekindled my grief over his death. He’ll forever be my dad. Referring to my biological father as “the source of my seed” protected me from the emotional construct of the word “father” applied to an unknown person with whom I had no such loving relationship.

I discovered the source of my paternal biology thanks to a DNA test and the open embrace of my biological father’s natural daughter (AKA my half-sister). When she asked me “How should I refer to him, I mean, Dad?” I responded rather callously, but genuinely. “He’s your dad, not mine. It was never his intention to be my dad. He sold his sperm to enable someone else to be my dad.”

Her brother (my half sibling), gave me no such open embrace. Once again, to defend myself from the bonding word “brother” applied to someone who showed no interest in my existence, I found it less threatening and emotionally safer to refer to him dispassionately as “her brother.”

We sometimes use the word identity loosely–or maybe it’s more accurate to say that it means something different to different people. How do you define identity and how do you feel your identity changed after your mother’s revelation and again later when you discovered your sister and the facts of your origin?

Identity is complicated. Nature, nurture, or a combination of both?

I always credited who and what I had become (my identity) to three major experiences. First, a disruptive childhood enhanced my adaptability. Second, an education from a fine state college opened innumerable doors of opportunity for me. Third, on-the-ground service as a special operations infantry officer in Vietnam shaped my collaborative leadership style. Wait a minute! What about my DNA? I always took that for granted. My last name had its roots in Northern Italy.

“Genealogical bewilderment” was a term I studied in a college psychology class. It was applied to the adopted who had experienced developmental and belonging issues as they sought for missing pieces of their genealogy. Upon learning that I was “semi-adopted,” I poked myself. I was still the same person, but everything had changed for me. All the stories of family lore were a fabrication. My birth certificate was a hoax. If not Northern Italian, what was I? Who was I?

My dad suffered from debilitating bouts of depression. As a younger man, he could shake them off. As he aged, he could no longer do so. He took his own life when I was sixteen. Dad’s old-school Italian family treated his mental illness as a shameful flaw to be hidden, lest it spill over onto them. Suicide of a loved one creates a wound that never heals. I felt flawed, inadequate, vulnerable, abandoned, and alone. I feared that this gene might pass onto me or my offspring. I camouflaged those feelings with bravado and kept his suicide a closely guarded secret. I vowed to become accomplished, always strong, and invulnerable. Isn’t that what my future family would need from me?  Had I overcompensated and shaped my behavior based upon a willful lie?

How could I feel deceived and relieved, sad and joyous, shame and pride…all at the same time? The feelings sometimes came in waves, either soft and soothing or churning and crashing. My experiences and how I dealt with them were mine. But what were the origins of my athleticism, my stamina and endurance, my intellect, and my tenacious will? Why was leadership so important to me? My identity had been challenged by this revelation. Was I the victim of identity fraud? Worse yet, was I a fraud?

My fervent need to know my genetic origins, health history and whether or not I had any siblings poured high octane gasoline on this blaze to fuel my relentless research…for 22 years…until I discovered my answers. During that process, with the help of some therapy, I bonded with the cartoon character Popeye. I still quote him often. “I yam what I yam”—no more flawed than anyone else!

Equipped with a healthier sense of myself, I finally uncovered my paternal genealogy (the source of my seed), a giving sister, and my genetic health history, all of which I could share with my children. With my persona intact, I better understood the origin of some of my characteristics, physical and otherwise. I wasn’t looking to create a new family. I had a loving one. But this unveiling was such a home run for me! I’m an only child with a couple of siblings I adore. We have a terrific friendship based upon unusual circumstance. Mission accomplished! I feel whole and complete. I am donor conceived, and I know my truth.

I find it interesting that we say “I am donor conceived” or “I’m an NPE” as opposed to I was donor conceived or I was an NPE, as if being donor conceived or an NPE isn’t something that happened to us but something we are. What are your thoughts?

I was born on December 12th. In astrological terms, that makes me a Sagittarius. It isn’t that I once was a Sagittarius. I am a Sagittarius. It isn’t that I was an NPE, misattributed, donor-conceived. I am. I will be donorconceived for the rest of my life. It can’t be changed. That truth has not defined me, but it does add to my identity.

Several times you used the word logical—as in “I was a logical Guidaboni.” I don’t recall seeing that before. Can you explain why you used that word and what it means to you?

My Italian cousin Eddie deserves the creative footnote for “logical.” He was the first of my paternal relatives with whom I shared my newly discovered donor conception. Since our relationship was no longer biological, Eddie coined me his “logical” cousin; a “logical” Italian. Doing so acknowledged our mutual feeling that blood alone does not define family. We were both keenly aware that we shared common experiences, common family stories of victory, rebounding from defeat, values and traditions, common foods, a common enemy at times (the elders when we misbehaved), and a common definition of hospitality—all part of our common upbringing.

Eddie is thrilled for me that I found my truth. It is only logical that our mutual feelings of family bond have intensified since my initial revelation and final discovery.

You used the word loneliness at one point to describe the feeling of having discovered this enormous secret in your life. Can you describe how the experience produces loneliness?

Allow me to give you a frame of reference for that feeling of loneliness.

As a small unit infantry commander in a combat zone, I led a competent team of people through the fear, stress, chaos, and confusion of hostile enemy fire. At times, I made life and death decisions in an instant, without complete pieces of information. I used those skills in my business career as a CEO in order to right organizations that had run aground. Leadership is a lonely place. There are competing opinions and interests all vying for attention. Only you hold the ultimate accountability. In war, the cost of accomplishing a mission can be as high as life or death. In business, the ultimate cost is measured in money, but it includes organizational longevity and career security, which can impact many thousands of people. These were unique experiences, from a unique perspective, shared by very few. My fellow infantry officers and fellow CEOs provided me with a sharing support group of sorts to help process those unique experiences and learn from the experiences of other people who have walked that walk. Collective wisdom is a powerful thing.

Upon this donor conception discovery, I felt genuinely alone. Who could relate? As I shared my confusing feelings with a closed circle of friends and family, their well-intending platitudes only enhanced my feelings of isolation. (“You at least know that you were loved and wanted” or “You are still the same person.”) Sure, I had empathetic friends and family and a fine trauma therapist. But throughout my entire 22 years of searching, I longed to meet and speak with other donor conceived people who shared my emotions from their own unique experiences to help me process and validate these confusing feelings. They were likely few and far between. Who were they? Where were they? Did they even know that they were donor conceived? I was surrounded by the love of so many, but I longed for company.

Moving away from language, but related to that last question, you write about having discovered the group We Are Donor Conceived. Can you talk about how important that discovery was and how it helped you not feel alone?

I received loving empathy and support from helpful friends and family. I had engaged an able therapist. They were able to “talk the talk,” but they had never “walked the walk.”  No handbook was readily available on how to walk that donor conceived walk. The internet and twenty-first century technology came to my rescue.

I googled “donor conceived and misattributed people.” Up popped We Are Donor Conceived, a private Facebook group that had only been in existence since 2016. It was comprised of several thousand donor conceived people from around the globe who had experienced the impact of misattribution and genealogical bewilderment from the surreptitious practice of artificial insemination by donor.

Everyone had their own unique story. Some had learned by the surprising results of their recreationally taken DNA test. Like me, they had experienced a range of emotions—sometimes simultaneously: anger, relief, violation, deceit, curiosity, shock, shame, isolation numbness, pride, grief, confusion, embarrassment, emptiness, sadness, joy, fulfillment, indifference, or a combination of high and low feelings that changed over time with more knowledge. Members of the group shared how they had discovered, processed, and benefitted (or not) from what they had discovered.

I was no longer alone. I had a nonjudgmental community with whom to share feelings, tactics, and strategy. This community had walked the walk. The power of collective wisdom from uniquely experienced people has been priceless.

You mentioned therapy quite a bit—how important was therapy to you in navigating your discovery and in your search for your roots?

This whole identity disruption I found traumatizing. The social context in which I had grown up and spent my adulthood (in both the war room and the board room) reinforced the attitude that weak and needy people were inadequate and unsuitable for command. Only the weak needed therapy.

In my case, this genetic identity trauma triggered flashbacks of a dysfunctional childhood, three decades of grief for my dead dad that I never allowed myself to fully experience, and the PTSD of war. It was difficult for me to admit. I was a CEO who needed some professional help to navigate the volcanic fallout from my changing genetic landscape. I did so discreetly.

My therapist was deadpan serious when he said, “You hit a trifecta. Newly experienced trauma often resurges others long past.” To effectively deal with my identity disruption, I had to deal with all three issues. I never worked so hard in all my life. In the process of searching for my roots, I had discovered myself.

At one point you wrote, “My persona had become softer, yet I had grown stronger, both personally and professionally, as a result of my intense, identity-challenging ten years from 1995 to 2005.” Can you say more about what you meant by that?

Therapy hammered into me that “flawed” is a human condition. It is okay to be blemished. Everyone has baggage. My therapy constructed a better handle for me to carry it. My unresolved baggage from childhood and war ruled my behavior. Never vulnerable, always strong; make tough, logical decisions without letting my feelings get in the way. That personality profile worked for me in the jungle as a Special Operations Team Leader and certainly in my chosen career. It was not working in my adult home.

My wife and I were in the midst of a marital crisis at the outset of my trifecta. We had issues. I had learned to deny my feelings and fears. To top it off, she found that the privacy with which I carried my feelings, my invulnerable air, had robbed her of an intimacy with me that she craved. For her, our relationship had not grown. It was shallow and incomplete. The leftover anger from a traumatic, life-altering Vietnam combat experience wore thin, too.

Gaining this deeper understanding of where I came from and who I am went a long way in helping to heal my marriage. I had learned to reveal more of myself to my inner circle and to connect more intimately with my wife and others close to me.

As a CEO for companies facing difficulty, I always thought I had provided the right kind of collaborative leadership. People followed me to take the hill. But I found that by adding an air of intimacy and revealing more of myself, the quality of my leadership increased markedly, as measured by the high caliber and low turnover of the teams that I built and the size of the hills my teams were able to conquer. No hill for us climbers!

Popeye might have said “I yam what I yam.” Perfect? No! But I was able to add, “I yam better than I yam.”

What most surprised you during your research into the field of assisted reproduction?

A whole host of discoveries surprised me as I researched the scandalous history and evolution of assisted reproductive technology, but two things stand out.

First, the unregulated practice of assisted reproductive technology has enabled dozens, even hundreds, of siblings, all unknown to one another, to be conceived from the same gamete donor, with no requirements for testing or registry and with no laws to combat what we term “fertility fraud.” A friend of mine who used to breed Rottweilers said it best. “The breeding of puppies enjoys greater legislative oversight.”

Second, a staggering number of us are misattributed, for whatever the circumstances. That is compounded by the generational impact. The experts estimate that 2% to 4% of us are misattributed; our DNA and our birth certificates don’t jive. While some make a calculated case that this number is a bit less, others make a cogent case that it is actually much higher. Either way, I find that number unfathomable. For instance, in my high school graduating class of 100, using that 2% to 4% estimate, two to four of my classmates are misattributed. I’m one of them. I have helped two other classmates interpret their DNA test results to the same conclusion. In a typical family tree, we have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and so forth. When applied a few generations out, in geometric fashion, all 100 of my classmates are misattributed to (at least) one of their third to sixth great grandparents. There are over 50 million people in DNA databases today. How many have experienced their own identity trauma with an accidental discovery? How many more have yet to discover that something doesn’t jive? There remains much more trauma yet to come.

There’s been some criticism of those of us who believe both that genetic inheritance matters and that we have a right to know our genetic identity, and that this emphasis on genetic information promotes the primacy/superiority of genetic family at the expense of nontraditional families? How would you respond to such criticism?

The right to know one’s genetics and the bonds of family, traditional or nontraditional, are not mutually exclusive. For instance, I can love my dad, not biological, and want, even need, to understand my genetics all at the same time. My “logical” cousin, Eddie, would agree.

As you know, many aren’t able to put all the pieces together as you did or haven’t found welcoming family. It may be hard to imagine, but how do you think your life might be different now had you not put together the pieces, had you not figured out the source of the seed, had you not been embraced by new family?

To put my answer to this question in context, I ran PSYOP missions in Vietnam. At times, we conducted Operation Wandering Soul. It exploited the superstition that the dead must be put to rest in their ancestral burial ground or their spirit would be doomed to wander forever.

I have reaped the benefits of therapy to better carry my baggage. I never aspired to develop a new family. My new sibling relationships are a bonus. In the absence of my final discovery, however, I expect I’d remain emotionally healthy, but the fire of genealogical bewilderment would endlessly rage within me. I imagined that I would be that agonizingly Wandering Soul, never at rest.

How did the experience of writing this book change you, if at all?

Before writing this book, I considered myself a retired venture capitalist, former high-tech CEO, combat veteran, non-profit leader, recreational sailor, and fun-loving grandfather. I still am. But this experience awoke my inner Don Quixote.

Mark Twain once said “The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

Today, I am an author and an activist for the rights of the donor conceived.PETER J. BONI credits his disruptive childhood, a state college education from UMass Amherst, decorated on-the-ground service as a US Army Special Operations Team Leader in Vietnam (coined his “Rice Paddy MBA”), plus luck-of-the-draw DNA with making him the person he is today. Out of his accomplished business career (high-tech CEO, venture capitalist, board chairman, non-profit leader, award-winning entrepreneur, senior advisor) grew his first book, All Hands on Deck: Navigating Your Team Through Crises, Getting Your Organization Unstuck, and Emerging Victorious. The father of two and grandfather of three, he lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Find him on the web, on Twitter @PeterJBoni1, and on Instagram @peterjboni.

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.

Right out of the gate, Febos blows up any responsibility we might feel to hold tight to our stories and privately tend our traumas, and she positions storytelling as a strategy of reclamation. “Writing,” she says, “is a form of freedom more accessible than many and there are forces at work in our society that would like to withhold it from those whose stories threaten the regimes that govern this society.”

In those words it’s easy to see the adoptee/NPE world as a microcosm of that larger society—in which the secret keepers who are threatened by our stories try to inhibit our voices. In this regard, her prescription is equally apt: “Fuck them. Write your life. Let this book be a totem of permission, encouragement, proof, whatever you need it to be.”

In literary criticism, the genre of memoir has been a durable punching bag, dismissed and derided—despite is popularity—as a vain and trivial exercise in “naval-gazing.”  It’s a judgment that tells would-be storytellers their histories aren’t worthwhile and their traumas are unseemly—not for public consumption. Febos annihilates the argument and makes a compelling case that personal narrative can be healing to the teller at the same time it’s a balm for readers. Writing, she says, “has become for me a primary means of digesting and integrating my experiences and thereby reducing the pains of living, or if not, at least making them useful to myself and to others. There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.”

She brilliantly explores what’s behind the dismissal of the form and, in particular, the admonition not to write about trauma, and turns the criticism on its head, asserting that writing about trauma is subversive and that resistance to the stories of oppressed people “is a resistance to justice.” Telling one’s story, Febos says, is, in fact, a requirement for recovery from trauma and for integrating the experience into one’s life.

To everyone who’s bought into this idea that trauma is a private matter not suitable to written expression, she’s emphatic: “Listen to me: It is not gauche to write about trauma. It is subversive. The stigma of victimhood is a time-worn tool of oppressive powers to gaslight the people they subjugate into believing that by naming their disempowerment they are being dramatic, whining, attention grabbing, or else beating a dead horse. By convincing us to police our own and each other’s stories, they have enlisted us in the project of our own continued disempowerment.”

Febos acknowledges secrets as the seed of almost all her writing and recognizes the power of untold secrets to imprison. She argues that writing can liberate us both from our fears about the subjects we hesitate to write about and form the isolation we feel about them, demonstrating to ourselves and readers that we’re not alone.

The third of the book’s four essay chapters, “A Big Shitty Party: Six Parables About Writing About Other People,” will be of special interest to many NPEs who wonder how to tell their stories when doing so may cause collateral damage. Febos asks who has the right to tell a story and offers perspective for how to look at the ethical issues that may arise when the narrative you have to share could upset or wound others.

Whether you wish to write to publish or to simply to bear witness and feel heard, there’s much in Body Work that will validate your aspirations and inform your process. Febos inspires and encourages and insists not only that personal narratives are valuable but also that creating and sharing them are imperative. If you’ve been shamed, made vulnerable, been traumatized, told that your story isn’t yours to tell, Body Work will speak to you.

*NPE: not parent expected, non-paternal event, non-paternity event—BKJ

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.

Although the book is written for MPEs and offers strategies for navigating the journey toward understanding, healing, and hope, its greatest strength may be as a guide for friends and family members, both families of origin and birth families. MPEs often rightly complain that no one understands what the experience is really like and struggle to express their feelings. Others may not understand and may believe that the MPE is overly sensitive or exaggerating the impact. Hay makes it clear that isn’t the case and advises people contacted by MPEs how to receive them with grace and understanding. This important aspect of the book can go a long way toward increasing awareness and understanding of the NPE/MPE experience and the needs of individuals in the wake of a DNA surprise.

A compassionate and clear-eyed guide to a challenging subject, it’s likely to inspire others to help fill the knowledge void and shine more light on the needs of NPEs and MPEs.Leanne R. Hay is an award-winning freelance journalist whose work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals. She’s a graduate of Villanova University, with a BA in history and minors in sociology and criminal justice. While researching this book, she earned professional certificates from Florida State University College of Social Work in Trauma & Resilience. She lives in Texas with her husband and their miniature Schnauzer rescue pup Arfie. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter. Find the book here. 

In 1961, a New York couple sent their seventeen-year-old daughter Margaret to Lakeview Maternity Home on Staten Island, where she gave birth to a boy she named Stephen. In love with her eighteen-year-old boyfriend, George, she was determined to keep the child, but was pressured by her parents as well as social workers at the home and the personnel of the Manhattan adoption agency—Louise Wise Services—to relinquish the baby for adoption. Margaret and George planned to marry, and during the many months when she was separated from Stephen, Margaret held out hope that she and George would prevail against a system that was cruelly stacked against them and regain custody of the child. Ultimately, she was coerced into giving up her parental rights. The boy was adopted and his name changed to David.

Margaret had been advised to move on, to forget about her baby. She never did. She went on to marry George and have a family, and all the while her son was never far from her thoughts. Through the years, as health problems emerged in her family, she contacted the Louise Wise agency to provide medical updates for the boy’s parents. The response was always curt. In the early 1980s, inspired by the rise of adoptee activism, Margaret began to search for her son, both for reassurance that he was well and also so he could know she’d never forgotten him and had always loved him. At one point, after her son’s 20th birthday, she gathered her courage, made elaborate preparations to make herself appear undeniably respectable, and knocked at the door of Louise Wise Services, hoping at most for information about her son, and at least for the opportunity to leave her contact information so that he could find her if he wanted to. Four times she rang the bell and tried to plead her case, and three times she was ignored. When she rang for the fourth time, the receptionist advised her that she’d call the police if Margaret didn’t leave. Devastated, Margaret collapsed to the floor and sobbed.

Meanwhile, David had been adopted by a loving couple, grew up, moved to Toronto and later Israel, finally settling in Portland, marrying and having children. By 2007, his health had deteriorated and he was undergoing dialysis, scheduled to receive a kidney donation from a friend. At the dialysis center in 2007, he met an investigative reporter, Gabrielle Glaser, who planned to write the feel-good story of the kidney donation. But it didn’t end there. In 2014, after having taken a DNA test, David reunited with Margaret shortly before he died. Glaser went on not only to tell their story, but also to exhaustively report on the rise of the adoption system in America, painting a sorrowful picture of an industry based on coercion, cruelty, and deception.

In this extraordinary, rigorously researched book, American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption, Margaret and David become the faces of the Baby Scoop Era, the period between the end of World War II and the early 1970s, when countless women were pressured to surrender their newborns, never to see them again. While Margaret and David’s fascinating story is the through line of the book, Glaser rips away the veil that hid decades of abuse and secrecy, detailing chillingly unethical practices that led to heartache for countless birth parents and adoptees.

Some of the practices and policies to which adoptees were subjected, which are nothing short of barbaric, exceed imagination. Glaser tells of babies subjected to “intelligence” tests conducted by Samuel Karelitz, a pediatrician who snapped newborns’ feet with rubber bands and declared crying to be the hallmark of a smart baby—a strategy he believed would help best match a baby to adoptive parents and which was carried out on babies for the first few months of their lives. She writes about a forensic anthropologist, Harry Shapiro, a one-time president of the American Eugenics Society, who was called upon to determine the race of babies, tasked with ensuring that dark-skinned babies were not placed with white families; about Viola Bernard, a Columbia University psychiatrist whose devious studies separated twins in an ethically dubious effort to study nature vs. nurture for the purposes of better matching babies to adoptive parents—an experiment that was the subject of the shocking documentary Three Identical Strangers; and the university-run “practice homes” where surrendered infants were housed and tended by a rotating group of home economic students so they could practice their mothering skills.

American Baby is an extraordinary achievement that destroys the notion of adoption as a win-win proposition for all members of the adoption triad. It’s an essential text for anyone wanting to learn the true history of adoption in America and understand the often-devastating consequences.

What was it about the Philomena Lee story, told in the book and biopic Philomena, that got under your skin? 

I saw the movie first and read the book later. I’d covered adoption as a beat, so I was aware that adoption begins with loss. That was my fundamental underlying understanding from the beginning, and it’s how I wound up interviewing David in the first place, because he was adopted. His story landed on my desk when was getting the kidney from his friend, because he didn’t have any family members who could give him one. He talked about hoping his birthmother would see the story, so he could learn more about his medical history for his three kids. A few years later, I thought about him a lot when I saw Philomena. I was really struck by the cold, moralistic Irish Catholic church—I’d seen the 2002 movie the Magdalene Sisters, and those stories ricocheted in my brain. Philomena’s portrayal by Judy Dench—the shame she had to endure at the hands of family, at the hands of the community, at hands of the church, but also the loss that she never recovered from—as a mother myself, it just dawned on me that this movie, with one of my favorite actresses, is about a woman’s life as a mother that was ruptured. And of course she didn’t forget her child. Of course she thought of her child every single day of her life. So that really drove it home for me what David’s birthmother’s experience may have been like.

What took you from that point to the point at which you realized you had to tell this story and why? 

David called to tell me he’d located Margaret and that, as he put it, she hadn’t wanted to give him up, that she loved him all of his life, that she married his birthfather, had gone on to have three more kids, and had done everything she could to maintain custody of him as a powerless teen in NYC in the early 60s. That revelation was such a profound reversal of this narrative that he’d been told, that he’d accepted. It was a narrative of many people from the Baby Scoop Era—the narrative adoption agencies wanted them to believe. What I heard in his voice about all those things was that they were so healing for him, and I imagine that it had to have been healing for Margaret to imagine that her son had had a good life with people who loved him very much. Of course, it was devasting that he had a terminal cancer and was very near death. But there was the power of learning that he’d been wanted, and the healing aspect for her to learn that he’d been loved. Then there was also the deceit that had been perpetrated on him, on adoptees, on birthmothers, and on adoptive families. The fictitious narratives that had abounded for everyone and had been allowed to continue for decades—that was just a shock. As someone who’s not adopted, I was intrigued and saddened and also outraged.

I thought I knew a lot about adoption before I read your book and I was shocked by so much, by the practice babies, and those passages where Margaret went and knocked on the door of Louise Wise Services—it was absolutely shattering.

It was shattering to get to learn about. I love her dearly. She’s an incredibly heroic and courageous woman. It’s astonishing how much she endured and is still standing. And that scene—we went to all those places together, she and I. Someone asked me if I’d fictionalized some details. I did not. She has a crystalline memory of the events that transpired, especially after we visited the sites. As we know, traumatic memories imprint in our brains in a very different way than ordinary stuff. You don’t remember what you bought at the grocery store six weeks ago. But you do remember a baby being taken away. You do remember trying desperately to fight for the right to keep the baby you bore and had been sent away to bear in secret. You remember walking up the steps of Louise Wise Services. You do remember what you wore and how you put on your eyeliner so you could be presentable to this elegant agency. And she was still trusting it up until that moment—she trusted it until she learned that David had never received any of the messages about his health conditions.

I’m amazed by the breadth and depth of the information you present. It’s remarkable that you were able to get access to some of it. What were the biggest obstacles or challenges in your research? Did anyone not want to share because some of the information reflected negatively on them?

The biggest disappointment was with the experiments about the rubber band babies [the Karelitz studies]. I did everything I could—and you may have seen this in the notes—to try to uncover what the motivation was for those studies, what the grant proposals looked like. I wondered if I would be able to uncover documents that had any of the names of the babies, surrendered for adoption and in agency custody, who were part of those experiments. But after 20 years, the federal government destroys grant proposals or studies that do not further scientific inquiry or lead to cures. I went to the National Archives. I think there were nine or ten studies the government paid for, those “induced crying” studies. I contacted all of those journals and asked if it was possible to obtain documentation surrounding those experiments. I got either non-responses or brush-offs from each and every one. And I don’t believe that all [research materials] were “destroyed.” I also flew to Florida to meet face to face with the surviving research psychologist who participated in those studies. On the phone, she’d been forthcoming. I got to her office in a strip mall but she’d clearly lawyered up by the time I got there. I’m an experienced reporter, and I know how to help guide people who want to speak their conscience. I thought that was what would happen. But in person she just absolutely shut down. Interestingly, she had a big rubber band ball on her desk and was tossing it back and forth between one hand and the other. My editor and I weighed whether to put her in the book, but there were so many villains already and she’d been a young 24-year old PhD. She claimed she just crunched the numbers. Induced crying! Really? She had no idea what the research was all about? She clearly had been coached to say that, so that was a little disappointing….

Most of the people who would have wanted to stand in my way are dead. Louise Wise is bankrupt. Karelitz is long dead, Viola Bernard and Harry Shapiro were long dead. What surprised me was the lionization of these people in real time. Nobody was looking behind the curtain about what was happening at that time. Nobody. I was shocked by that—even up until now, even Karelitz’s research on crying is still cited—without so much an asterisk about the brutality of it.

And you mentioned Dr. Joyce Brothers—someone so many in this country at a certain time looked up to, and it seemed as if she hadn’t done any due diligence.

She also parroted the Karelitz studies and promoted them as a useful tool for worried mothers who wrote in to her and said “I’ve got baby who’s a crier.” And she said, “Don’t worry, your baby is going to be smart. According to Dr. Karelitz, who does these rubber band studies, your baby will be smart.” Nobody even raised an eyebrow as far as I can tell.

You weren’t a newcomer to the topic. You had already covered a beat of related issues. Still, did you have an inkling of the full scope of abuse, hypocrisy, and deceit before you’d delved deeply into research?

I had no idea. I didn’t really know the breadth and the depth of the treachery and the deceit. As much as I understood from the very beginning—and I’ll get to this—from the very beginning of the first story I ever did about adoption, I just had no idea of the massive transactional history of it. I had no idea of the fact that it was an industry. It was an industry—one that took babies for a fee and placed them with families who weren’t their own. Like in all long projects, you don’t automatically start out knowing everything. It’s a layering process of understanding, and only when you finished and step back and say wow, okay, this is not just a story or a book about adoption, it’s really about our society. It’s about sexuality. It’s about policing women’s bodies. It’s about the paternalism of medicine. It’s about the conservative postwar mores that allowed this to flourish.

Is there any one thing more than any other that surprised or shocked you during your investigation? 

The experiments on ten-minute old babies, the prolonged time in foster care decades after it had been well established that infants needed to be able to rely for their own safety and development in the world on a steady caregiver who was going to be there for them. And the institutionalized cruelty of it.

A recent New York Times piece on your book was titled “Adoption Used to Be Hush-Hush.” Is it fair to say it still is in some ways? A lot has changed, but it still is legalized deception, isn’t it? I believe four-fifths of people don’t have access to their records and it’s still transactional.

No, you’re 1000% correct. And as much as I may have thought things were improved, since the publication of this book, I’ve been deluged with stories of fraud; deceit; current transactional, flat-out sale of babies; and I’m going to need to find a home for some of this stuff I’m uncovering. It’s ongoing. Yet adoption is still celebrated. We see these celebrity adoptions, and people say “Look how wonderful it is, Hoda may adopt a third child!” Remember that viral video of a little boy who’d been adopted and he’d invited the whole kindergarten class to come to his finalization celebration? And everyone said, “Oh, what a heartwarming story!” But whoa, wait a minute! What about what that little boy lost? Okay, great that he has a family now that’s going to care for him and love him and cherish him in the manner all children deserve, but we just run right over that initial foundational truth, which is he lost something. He lost his kin. That’s the title of your magazine. It’s a rupture.

And I wanted to throw a zucchini at the screen of Three Identical Strangers. I hated it. The other day I watched a talk about the movie by Harvard psychologists and psychiatrists and I was so dismayed that they didn’t raise any of the questions that any sentient person would raise after watching that film. They didn’t even broach the meaning of the original trauma. Greg Luce, founder of Adoptee Rights Law Center, was also observing the talk. He texted me halfway through and said, “I can’t watch this. They’re talking about adoptees as if we’re just subjects.” He and the adoptee community have opened my eyes to the ongoing infantilization of adoptees and the prurient interest in them as subjects. It’s outrageous.

Does the adoption industry remain predatory in any way? Is it still an industry? Does coercion remain a factor at all or is that a thing of the past?

Oh, absolutely. I’ve got several stories I’m trying to pursue and even some lawsuits that are being filed on trying to stop these predatory, coercive fraudulent promises made to families in the name of open domestic adoption. Such arrangements are rarely legally enforceable, and promises are made that are not kept. It all depends on the good will and intention of the adoptive parent, and in some cases, birthparents, too. I’ve heard from birth families who are told by adoptive parents, “Sure, of course we’re going to be able to get together.” But then they move to another state, or even another country, and the birth families never see their children again.

Adoption is widely described in our culture as a selfless act of love and generosity. Do you believe most Americans at this time have a realistic view of past or present-day adoption practices?

I do believe the narrative we have is the one we’ve always had, that this is the best solution for everyone involved and everyone ends up happy, happier. It’s very difficult to present a counter narrative. The first story I ever wrote about adoption was the early 2000s, and I had seen in my coffee shop in Portland, where I lived at the time, a flier of what appeared to be a racist depiction—stick figures filled in with yellow highlighter with Asian features and straight black hair, and I thought “What’s this? How can this be in socially conscious Portland?” Then I looked up and saw the words,  “Are you an angry Korean American adoptee? So are we!” I called the number on the tear-off sheet, and became aware of the history of HOLT International, which was founded in Oregon and was the first adoption agency to facilitate international transracial adoptions on a big level. I spent some time learning about the agency’s roots in Cold War politics, and interviewed four women who’d been adopted through Holt. My editor at the time was a really smart intuitive guy who had his own history in this realm—his Black serviceman father had married his Japanese mother in Japan after the war—and so he’d lived through a lot of similar experiences growing up in rural Oregon after coming from Japan at an early age, being orphaned and then raised by white foster parents. So we just had the voices of these adoptees, and I didn’t get in the way—the story was in their own words, like what you and I are doing, with moving portraits of them. And it was before social media, so no one posted it, but my email was at the bottom of every story, and the next morning I was deluged with responses from transracial international adoptees and from adoptive parents. The response from adoptees was, “This is my experience, appreciate this.” But the adoptive parents were furious. “How dare they! How dare you? We rescued these kids. These ingrates!”

That piece is what really changed my entire view of adoption. It was David’s experience, of course, that prompted me to write this book. But my background came from that original story. It’s been almost 20 years, and I don’t think that much has changed. Do you?

I don’t see the change. I’m neither adopted nor the scholar you are, but I don’t see any evidence of it. I just still see a lot of pain. I’m not even sure—I guess it remains to be seen—how well open adoption works.

There’s no regulation. And there’s still resistance to the idea that it’s traumatic. An academic with personal experience with adoption once told me he didn’t believe there was evidence that birthmothers suffer. “Where’s the evidence/ Show me the evidence?” Which I presented.

This was recent?

Yes, four years ago. My internal response was, well, show me the evidence that people in Middle Passage suffered. We can’t interview them, but of course they suffered. I didn’t say that, but it was my knee jerk reaction. I did present the evidence.

There was a Cyprus-born British researcher, Sir John Triseliotis, who studied adoption for decades, and his research shows that among women who had reunited with their children there was an enormous sense of relief and decreased feelings of guilt, and for adoptees there was an enormous reduction in anxiety and depression.

Many readers are likely to be shocked by much of what they read in American Baby. And many will think much of what shocked them either no longer exists or, if it in fact no longer exists, could never happen again. How would you respond to them? 

We’re still battling this ongoing rubric with which we see this social engineering experiment.

In what way do the lessons of American Baby pertain to, or serve as a cautionary tale to, the artificial reproduction industry, which remains almost entirely unregulated?

This is just another realm of the unregulated creation of new families, and, if you want my honest opinion, maybe one of the reasons people don’t want to look too deeply at adoption is because they may be consumers or future consumers of artificial reproductive technology, so they’ve got their heads down, they’re not interested.

So much of your subject matter is heartbreaking, traumatic, and rage-inducing. I imagine it could be overwhelming and deeply disturbing. Can you tell us about your own emotional journey in writing this?

Thank you for asking that question. I had a lot of anger. On one hand, I could channel it onto the page, but the weight of it was great. Sometimes after a day with Margaret, I’d sob in the car on the way home.

You began this project as a reporter. Do you now consider yourself an advocate or do you see that as a conflict?

No, once I became aware of the duplicity, the lying, the experimentation—it’s an impossibility as far as I’m concerned to look at this and remain unmoved or objective. It’s wrong, and yes, I’m a journalist, but in this case, I have a duty and a moral right to speak out and draw attention. Someone referred to me as an activist, which I’m not, but I am an advocate. One of my first jobs was as a reporter at the Associated Press in Baltimore, and if you reported on something you had to get a critic from the other side—and I didn’t really find critics—how could you be supportive of experiments on ten-minute old babies? How could you be supportive of adult men and women not having access to their original documents? Their own history? How could you be supportive of that?

What would you most hope could come out of having told this story? 

I would hope the larger public recognizes this hidden chapter in social history is still happening, still in plain sight. The legacy of secret or closed adoptions persists today for so many people and their families, and not just the adopted men and women—also their birth and adoptive parents; their spouses; their children; their siblings. At the end of the day—not even at the end of the day—family matters, who you are matters, your kin matters. That’s why we have DNA testing, why genealogy is the second most trafficked realm of the Internet, after porn. There’s a natural curiosity to know where you come from, what your origin story is, what your first days were like.Gabrielle Glaser is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist whose work on mental health, medicine, and culture has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and many other publications. BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles and essays about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

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A health scare kickstarted Julie Ryan McGue’s five-year search for her birth family, recounted in her new memoir, “Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging,” which will be published by She Writes Press in May.By Julie McGueLisa 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?”

Ethnically and racially diverse, the group members ran the spectrum in age from thirtysomethings to seventy-year-olds. With the exception of two birth mothers, the rest were adult adoptees, and all but three were women. The common thread: Catholic Charities had facilitated everyone’s adoption. I was grateful that Howie and I had chosen seats at one end of the horseshoe. Since this was my first meeting, it settled my nerves to hear the group’s answers before taking my turn.

More than half of us were waiting to hear back from a birth parent or birth daughter/son. From my recent experience of waiting weeks for my birth mom to answer Linda’s outreach, I knew how excruciating passing the time can be. A woman, I guessed her to be in her late thirties, had been anticipating a response from her birth mother for over a year. When she broke down in sobs during her introduction, the Kleenex box at the center of the table shot over to her like a hockey puck.

Two older adoptees, both males, had yet to decide to send their first outreach letter. Howie fell in this category. For them, taking in the experiences of the group and deliberating over the pros and cons of search and reunion kept bringing them to the meetings. I understood their reluctance. Only twice in my fifty-one years had I seriously considered looking into my own adoption. If it hadn’t been for the breast biopsy pushing me down this path, I might not have learned of the confidential intermediary program or Catholic Charities Post Adoption Services.

One of the birth mothers and a female adoptee shared their reunion stories. Both glowed like someone who’d recently fallen in love. They passed around photos of themselves beaming, wrapped in tight embraces with their newfound relatives. To the group’s credit, each of us ogled at how much the searchers resembled their child or parent, and each attendee professed such joy and support for the searcher that I wondered why I’d delayed in joining such a compassionate crowd. Given the recent dismissal by my birth mom, I doubted I’d be sharing photos of my twin and me flanking our birth mother anytime soon. Nor could I envision Jenny and me sandwiched between both of our mothers—that thought almost made me laugh out loud.

When it was my turn to talk, I clasped my sweaty hands tightly in my lap. “I’m Julie. This is my first meeting. I’m an adoptee.” I tried to make eye contact with the people across the table. “I also happen to be a twin. Thanks to Catholic Charities’ policy of keeping twins together, my sister and I were adopted into the same family.” I smiled at Lisa, our moderator, and then I looked down at the tabletop. “Due to health concerns, I began the search for my birth mother last year.” I felt my brother’s reassuring hand on my shoulder. “Last month, I learned that she didn’t want to connect with us. I’m hoping she’ll change her mind someday.” When I glanced up, I caught the Kleenex box just in time.

Plucking a tissue, I introduced Howie. “He was adopted through Catholic Charities too and is considering a search for his birth relatives.”

Lisa jumped in. “And Julie, how would you answer the icebreaker question?”

The tissue balled up in my palm. I’d thought hard about this when the others spoke. The angry-rejected-adoptee-me, the one I’d been working hard at controlling these days, wanted to ask my birth mom: how could she look herself in the mirror every day–she who gave up not one, but two daughters, and rejected both of them? Twice.

The person-that-was-me-before-this-adoption-search, the one I was desperately trying to reclaim 24/7, chose a different response to offer the group. “I would ask her if she has thought of my sister and me throughout her life, and if she ever wondered what had happened to us.”Julie Ryan McGue is an author, a domestic adoptee, and an identical twin. She writes extensively about finding out who you are, where you belong and making sense of it. Her weekly blogs That Girl, This Life and her monthly column at The Beacher focus on identity, family, and life’s quirky moments. Born in Chicago, Illinois, McGue received a BA from Indiana University in psychology and an MM in Marketing from the Kellogg Graduate School of Business, Northwestern University. She’s served multiple terms on the board of the Midwest Adoption Center and is an active member of the American Adoption Congress. Married for more than 35 years, McGue and her husband split their time between Northwest Indiana and Sarasota, Florida. She’s the mother of four adult children and has three grandsons. If she’s not at her computer, McGue is on the tennis court or out exploring with her Nikon, and she’s working on a collection of personal essays. Visit her website, and find her on Facebook, on Twitter @juliermcgue, and on Instagram @Juliemcgue.BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles and essays about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.

Jeff award-winning actress and musician Cory Goodrich has released her first memoir, Folksong: A Ballad of Death, Discovery, and DNA, published by Finn-Phyllis Press. Folksong is at once a remarkable memoir of love and longing, an emotional ballad of grief and forgiveness, an ode to self-discovery, and a heart-stirring look at the lengths to which a family will go to protect themselves and each other.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

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.

But when home alone, or even at home with David and the girls, I still get a little paranoid. Obsessive. Worried that I don’t belong to this family, and that there was a plot to keep the truth from me. To punish me.

I know this is not true, but my brain goes there.

I talk out loud to myself when I am alone making coffee.

I argue with myself. I start to doubt the information I’ve been given from various people, and I make up wild conspiracy theories in my head. I feel just a small crack emerge in my sanity, and I worry that another hit will blow that motherfucker wide open and I will fall down the chasm of insanity like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Down, down, down, down…

1989, Lancaster, Pennsylvania

I’m twenty-one and I’m doing a national children’s theatre tour of Alice in Wonderland. We are performing at the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster. For some reason, we have a couple of free days after this performance, before our little bus-and-truck production moves on to the next city. Lancaster is only an hour’s drive from Wilmington, so I’ve asked my father, Tom, to come pick me up so we can spend a few days together before my cross-country tour resumes. I arrange for a ticket to be held at the box office under his name, and I tell him I will meet him out front after the show.

I am excited because Daddy has never seen me perform; he saw none of my high school choir concerts or musicals or college plays or cabarets. Nothing. I have only seen him in his world—in Delaware. He has never seen me in mine. I am thrilled that he will not only finally see me perform but he will watch me play Alice, the title character in a really charming musical for young audiences.

I’m nervous during the performance, knowing he is there in the audience, but inside I am beaming. My father is finally seeing me, the authentic me. Not the little girl but a woman, a paid performer. I AM pretty enough to be an actress.

I walk outside of the theatre after the performance, and I see Daddy standing by the box office window. I wonder, as I do every year when I see him again, if I should hug him. I run to him and pause awkwardly, and he says hello. I don’t hug him even though I want to. I wait for him to say something about my performance, and when he doesn’t, I self-consciously ask how he liked the show. “Oh, I didn’t see it. I waited out here.”

It would be cliché to say, “time stopped” or “my heart sank into my stomach,” but those things happened. The moment took my breath away—also cliché, but so true. All those years I spent growing up five-hundred miles away from him in Michigan, all the missed high school concerts, the leads in school plays, the chorus solos—these were the things that defined me. And here was the one chance he had to see—in person—the person I was and the life I had chosen, and he didn’t walk into the building. He was there, but he waited outside.

Sometimes, the things that most define our lives are not the things that happen, but the things that don’t.

Daddy died a year later, so there was never another opportunity, and even if there had been, I doubt he would have walked into the building then either. It plagues me. Did he not understand how important performing was to me? Did he just not care? Was this the ultimate metaphor for my life? My father never saw me perform. My father never saw me. My father never knew me.

And I never knew my father.

“There are things you don’t know about your father, Cory.”

And this is why I worry that another blow to the tiny but delicate crack in my sanity will shatter me wide open.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

PRETTY LIES

October 5, 2017—One day post surgery

I spend all day at the hospital with Jim. Mama drifts in and out of consciousness, but she has been down deep most of the day. She wakes periodically and claws at the tube, but the breathing machine is still doing 95% of the work, pushing air in and out of her lungs. We are frustrated and heartsick, but the nurses and doctors keep repeating flatly that she is not processing the anesthesia in a normal fashion (duh), but it is nothing to worry about—everyone responds differently. I ask what they are giving her for her pain, and they say Tylenol and I lose my shit again. Tylenol doesn’t even begin to alleviate one of my headaches, how could it possibly work on a body cleaved in two? They refuse to give her anything stronger despite my pleas, and I wonder if they think the sheer pain will rouse her from her coma.

At around seven, Jim leaves the hospital to go pick up my sister Susie from the airport. He will take her back to the house in Green Valley, and I will sit vigil with my mother until I am too weary to take any more. I am curled up in the hard chair, playing music for her, trying to focus on my work as producer of a Christmas CD for the charity organization Season of Concern. Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men is about the furthest thing from my mind right now, so I get very little done. I crack open The House at Riverton and read the first page for the third time, but I cannot focus, so back into my bag it goes. I hold my mother’s hand and self-consciously talk to her. Can she hear me? What do I have to say, anyway? Will sappy declarations of love mean anything, or will she wonder who the hell this emotional basket-case child is? But I talk anyway and sing softly to her, feeling foolish but determined to let her know that I am there.

Mark, the day nurse, is in and out of the tiny ICU room, and he smiles and gives me encouragement, but I can see he is frustrated looking at the numbers on my mother’s chart. He has been adjusting levels of various medications throughout the course of the day, but nothing seems to satisfy him. I’ve asked him several times if my mother’s condition is something he’s seen before, and each time he shrugs and says, “I’ve seen it all.” But now that Jim is out of the room, his answer changes. He wants me to know the truth because he knows I know he has been lying.

Mark is short and sturdy; a comfortable man. I’ve also learned he is a musician, so I instinctively trust him. He is the type of man you could lean on, so I do. “Mark, is this normal?” I ask again.

He sighs and sits down in the chair next to me. He takes my hand. “No. It’s not. She is down so deep, and if she doesn’t start breathing on her own soon, you are going to have to make some difficult choices.”

“She doesn’t want this,” I tell him, shaking my head furiously. I can feel her not coming up for air, not breathing on her own because she wants to die, but you can’t exactly pull the plug on an intuition.

“Are there any other options? Is there anything else we can do?”

“Dialysis,” Mark tells me, “but we really don’t want to put her through that. It’s extreme.” He takes my other hand and looks me straight in the eyes. “So, we are going to do everything we can to get her out of this before we go that route.”

Okay…Dialysis—not a good sign.

I thank Mark for his forthrightness and his sympathy. He gives me courage by telling me the truth.

Here’s the thing about the truth: It is usually easier to handle than a lie. When you tell a lie, the person you are telling it to usually knows, somewhere inside. They may not consciously realize it, but an uneasy feeling sets in. They start to doubt themselves and their instincts, and they know something is wrong, even if they can’t quite put a finger on what that something is.

It works that way for me, anyway. I can deal with a hard truth. A pretty lie, on the other hand, is like walking in quicksand, every step pulling me further down and under, just like my mother is down and under in her postoperative coma.

Tell me the truth so I am not basing my life on a lie: Have you guessed my mother’s secret yet?Cory Goodrich came to Chicago to pursue her dream of acting in 1989. Born in Wilmington, Delaware and raised in Clarkston, Michigan, she’s a Jeff Award-winning best actress for her roles as Mother in Drury Lane Oakbrook’s acclaimed production of Ragtime and as June Carter Cash in the Johnny Cash revue Ring of Fire at Mercury Theater Chicago. A five-time Jeff nominee, Goodrich has performed in productions at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, Chicago Shakespeare, Theatre at the Center, Ravinia, Candlelight, and Drury Lane. A graduate of Michigan State University, she’s also a singer/songwriter, producer, writer, mother of two, and children’s composer with two award-winning CDs, Hush and Wiggly Toes and a recording artist with original country album W.O.M.A.N. As the recipient of the 2015 Cohen-Grappel Recording Endowment, Goodrich produced Wildwood Flower, a collection of traditional and original folk songs featuring the autoharp. Her latest experimental folk album, produced with The Quiet Regret’s Ethan Deppe, is set to drop in March and features music from her memoir. Visit her website, find her on Facebook, and on Instagram @folksongbook and @corygoodrich.

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.

—BKJ

Excerpt from We Are All Human Beings

By Paul Kimball

For about a week I called the two numbers. As I recall, the New York number had a strange answering machine message. The L.A. number would just ring without any response. Try to imagine what this feels like. If she answers, I am going to speak with my birth mother for the first time. Perhaps this isn’t her, just a coincidence. I don’t know what to expect. I am so frightened. Once she answers there is no turning back. Both of our lives are changed in an instant. She has no idea that I am trying to contact her. I planned out my opening remarks carefully.

And then she answered.

It was the L.A. number. The one that kept ringing. This is how I remember the phone call. Luckily, I wrote this in my journal back in 2000.

Birthmother Wendy: “Hello.”

Me: “Hello. My name is Paul Kimball and I am with musicians local 189 in Stockton, California. I am looking for a professional cellist named Wendy Brennan.” With this information, she could hang up on me but always be able to find me.

Wendy: This is she. Later she told me that she thought that she was being asked to play chamber music.

Pause, pause, pause.

Me: “I don’t quite know how to say this but does the name Frank Novak mean anything to you?”

Pause.

Wendy: “It might.” It might? Does this mean that she knows who I am?

I don’t remember the next exchange.

Wendy: “Are you of Armenian descent?” She knows who I am, and I know who she is. No one but my birth mother would ask that question out of the blue.

Me: “Yes I am half Armenian.”

Wendy: “Oh my God. Where were you born?”

Me: “In Fort Bragg California, November of 1962. I think we both know who we are.”

We talked on the phone for three hours.

It was so friendly. I was ecstatic! I have never felt so complete in my entire life. A hole had been filled. I had a new friend. If that is how you describe being reunited! We were both classical musicians. We both played in orchestras. We were both nice and friendly. I had a birth sister who did not know of me. I was married with two daughters. She had performed in Carnegie Recital Hall as a soloist to good reviews. She had lived with Nadia Boulanger, the esteemed teacher of composers and studied cello with Paul Tortelier, the great cellist. She had been in the American Symphony under Leopold Stokowski and played in Broadway Pit Orchestras. I conduct orchestra pits for musicals. She had a New York accent. She split her time between L.A. and New York. I loved this woman. “The capacity for love had expanded.” She had a 31-year-old daughter who attended Juilliard as a child flute player and was involved as an actress in T.V., movies, and commercials. I act in plays and was even in a dopey local T.V. commercial in Stockton that aired constantly. People still talk about it on occasion.

We decided to meet as soon as possible. We had thought of a halfway point, but I wanted to drive down to her apartment in L.A.

I was teaching elementary music at T.C.K. at the time. I updated my fellow teachers on the story. I will always love them for their compassion.

The night before I left, I visited my adopted parents, Lorna and Bob. I held their hands and told them that I loved them. I didn’t want to hurt them, but I had to do this. They assured me that it was okay. Mom said that she didn’t feel threatened. From my journal in 2000. “I love them so much! They are my best friends. I tell them everything. I never want to lose them, and I get scared I might. I also don’t want to lose Wendy and Raya (birth sister). Both families are very important to me as are the Mullers (In-laws). I need all of them. I love Jeanette, Seth and Amy. I love Dominee, Alyssa and Ashley. These are my family members and I love them.”

It was time to drive to L.A. That week I had been only getting about 4 hours of sleep a night. The evening before the drive I went to bed at 11:45 p.m. and woke up at 3:30 a.m. I copied down my story of Scream as well as a tribute to Jacqueline Du Pre that I had put in my journal in 1987. This was 13 years before meeting Wendy. When I wrote this, Jacqueline Du Pre had just passed away. I had no clue that my birth mother was a cellist.

The following was written 32 years earlier.

Reflections on Jacqueline Du Pre – October 23^rd, 1987

Jackie died on October 19^th of the ill fated disease, Multiple Sclerosis. She was 43, I believe. She has been and probably always will be my favorite musician, the one that I listen to more than anyone else. I consider her one of my teachers even though we never met.

I first heard of her when some fellow Berkeley High students were talking. They had seen and heard Schubert’s Trout Quintet on PBS. Jacky, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman, Daniel Barenboim and Zubin Mehta were the players! Later when Rebecca (Strauss) and I were in the Berkeley Public Library we came across a Du Pre record and Becca said: “Paul. Check this out. I’ve never heard the record but you will love Du Pre.” When we listened to it I felt almost sick with emotion. I was struck by the absolute sincerity of her playing. She expressed so much that there was simply no way to miss it. Her tone is golden. It is her pure soul with nothing to disturb it. Every time I hear her, I am inspired, embarrassed by my own inhibitions in music, bewildered, determined, determined to not miss the wonders of life as I pass through it. Her second recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto is one of the greatest musical accomplishments. In some of my most emotional moments I have often felt them by reliving her performance of this piece. The opening theme after the great introduction represents so much painful longing. It reaches into space, searching, searching for something. To me it is so lonely. Perhaps I relate this to the loneliness I felt in college. I often remember going for long walks and thinking about this theme with her yearning tone and feeling sad, yet expressing the sadness, not just holding it in. Lorna would be proud!

In my own playing I hear her traits. Trying to achieve a personal tone, letting the wonderful stresses in phrases come alive, but most of all, trying to be absolutely free and deeply sincere in expression.

Thank you Jackie. I love you and am grateful for your greatness. May you rest in peace having lived a difficult but important life.

Little did I know that in a way, I was paying tribute to my lost birth mother; my original musician, cellist. I felt sick with emotion listening to Jacqueline Du Pre but didn’t know the full reason. How could I? I was remembering Wendy’s playing from before I was born.Paul Kimball is an active musician, choir teacher, French hornist, and actor in Stockton, California. As a baby, he lived in foster care and was eventually adopted by a liberal Berkeley family in the 1960s. He is married to Dr. Dominee Muller-Kimball. They have two daughters, Ashley and Alyssa. Look for his book here. BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

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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 journeys of seekers tracing their bloodlines—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 questions about heritage, ethnicity, race, culture, and privacy.” And for others, she demonstrates, it validates both vague intuition and long-held suspicions.

Among the story tellers are those who’ve made incidental and accidental discoveries and those who deliberately traced family connections in an effort to solve known puzzles or satisfy a nagging suspicion. Sammons discovered that for most, no matter how shocking the discoveries may have been, individuals move past surprise and even trauma to recognize transformative life lessons.

Excavating the past, Sammons reveals, not only helps people to reconstruct their own family stories, but also to redefine the nature of family and open a new window on the political, historical, and cultural environments that formed our ancestors’—and thus our own—identities.

Throughout, Sammons tells the stories of people who find answers to the questions “’Who am I?’ and ‘Why am I who I am?’”

The answers, almost without except, point to positive, even joyful, responses. Says one of her interviewees, “I always felt like I was such an oddball, but now know the truth.” One seeker observed that having found her biological father filled gaps in her self-knowledge, while one who found a biological sister said the discovery “filled a hole I didn’t even know existed.”

Another describes the experience of unexpected relationships “freeing.” Case in point: Elizabeth Garden, author of the novel Tree of Lives, which features a character drawn to Jewish people in her community who discovers after taking a DNA test that she’s part Jewish. It’s an experience that happened in the author’s own life. After taking the test in search of a Jewish thread running through her distant ancestry, Garden said, “The result was a lot more than a thread —it was  whole new warp and weft in the family tapestry.” The discovery, Sammons writes, “brought her a sense of rootedness within a culture she’d always been drawn to without understanding why.”

There are stories about individuals who discover their older sisters are in fact their mothers, whose fathers aren’t their fathers, whose beloved cultural identities are not theirs through bloodlines, and whose research reveals a cascade of trauma through generations.

Throughout, Sammons affirms the transformative power of storytelling. “Yes,” she says, “so many family secrets are rooted in shame about issues that define our common humanity, such as infidelity, hidden sexuality, abuse, racial or religious origins, or infertility. But the best antidote is to tell our stories. By doing so, we can heal the wounds for our entire lineage—wounds that have been holding those who came before us captive for years.”

Family stories, she insists, can break the inherited cycle of trauma; foster forgiveness, acceptance, and understanding; shatter stereotypes; and lead to a reexamination of assumptions about race.

The exploration of ancestry, Sammons illustrates, is vastly more than mere hobby. It goes to the heart of our shared humanity. “Our ancestors need us to connect some dots,” Elizabeth Garden told Sammons, “and only those of us who listen to their voices can do that.”

—BKJMary Beth Sammons is an award-winning journalist and author of more than a dozen books including Living Life as a Thank You: The Transformative Power of Daily Gratitude and The Grateful Life: The Secret to Happiness, and the Science of Contentment. Her latest is Ancestry Quest: How Stories From the Past Can Heal the Future. She’s a cause-related communications consultant for numerous nonprofits and healthcare organizations including Five Keys Schools and Programs, Cristo Rey Network, Rush University Medical Center and more. She’s been the Bureau Chief for Crain’s Chicago Business, a features contributor for the Chicago Tribune, Family Circle, and Irish American News, and a daily news reporter for Daily Herald and AOL News. She lives in the suburbs of Chicago.

Libby Copeland is an award-winning journalist, former Washington Post staff author and editor, and author of The Lost Family: How DNA Testing is Upending Who We Are, published in March 2020 by Abrams Press.How long did you spend researching and writing The Lost Family?

Altogether, about three years. I first wrote about Alice Collins Plebuch’s fascinating genetic detective story in The Washington Post in early 2017. The response to that story, which was hundreds of emails from other consumers sharing intimate and moving DNA testing stories, convinced me the topic needed to be a book, and I started researching for the proposal soon afterward. But the bulk of the work was done during 2018 and 2019. In The Lost Family, I revisit Alice’s story and tell it much more fully. I was able to travel to Washington State and spend time with her, as well as do historical research going back a hundred years to illuminate her family’s astonishing story. And as I follow her story, I also tell many other tales from people I Interviewed—wrenching, moving stories of how this technology is changing how we see ourselves and how we talk to one another, not to mention how we think about truth and the past.

What so intrigued you initially that you were willing to devote so much time and attention to this issue? Did you realize early on how complex the subject would be?

I was really intrigued by the idea that questions about genetic origins and family could lead individuals, families, and the culture at large to deep explorations of essential human questions about identity, what makes a family, and how we define ethnicity. The science was indeed quite complex, and so were the experiences of people affected by this technology. I got to interview a lot of genetic genealogists about their techniques and the history of the field, and to tour a DNA testing lab and speak with a number of scientists and historians about human genetics and autosomal DNA testing. But really, it was the deeply human stories that moved me most. The emails from readers and the stories I heard from other people I interviewed sometimes moved me to tears. There were stories of adoptees searching for family, of donor-conceived individuals defining and building relationships with half-siblings and donor fathers, of people discovering NPEs and struggling to incorporate that news with everything they’d known before. I was really interested in the idea that this technology was touching the most intimate parts of people’s lives and changing them forever. I was intrigued, too, by the idea that the past is not really over. It’s still very present in people’s lives, and DNA testing—and all that it can uncover—is prompting people to reassess what they thought they knew about things that happened 50, 60, 70 years ago.

Of all the seekers you spoke with, what story touched you most?

There are so many stories! It’s hard to pick one. There’s a very moving story in the book about a foundling who was left on a doorstep in the 1960s and adopted. Years later, she went looking for her biological family in order to know where she’d come from and to understand the context for having been given up. Her name is Jacqui. The genetic genealogist CeCe Moore helped Jacqui and suggested I interview her because she thought Jacqui’s story was so poignant and because she wanted people to see the range of ways that DNA testing stories can play out. Jacqui’s story is reflective of the fact that, as one mental health counselor put it to me, reunions aren’t always “happy” ones, even though those tend to be predominant in news stories.

Jacqui’s sisters on both sides have largely declined to have relationships with her; one set of sisters even decided they don’t believe that she’s their relative, despite clear evidence from DNA results. There are certainly happy reunion stories, and I write about a number of them in the book. But Jacqui’s story is equally important for people to read because she expresses her desire for connection with her siblings in a heartfelt, evocative, and relatable way. And yet, her truth is so threatening to her siblings that they decline and even deny the connection. There’s no easy solution to this kind of problem, and the complexity of it—and the way genetic relations who are essentially strangers can feel themselves to have hugely different interests from one another—illustrates how much we need to grapple with the legacy of what DNA testing is uncovering. I would argue there needs to be vastly better support for the millions of Americans trying to navigate these situations.

As you talk to people about DNA testing (consumers and potential consumers) what have you found to be most misunderstood?

I think if it hasn’t happened to you, it can be difficult to understand just how disorienting it is to discover that your own genetic origins are not what you long believed. From my interviews with people over months and sometimes years, I’ve come to understand that these revelations are not rapidly processed and incorporated into a person’s reality; indeed, the process of understanding a profound surprise go on for years, perhaps for a lifetime. A DNA surprise can pose questions about a consumer’s relationship with her parents, her understanding of her childhood, her sense of where she belongs, and her orientation on the world. These revelations can be traumatic, even if people are ultimately glad to know the truth about themselves. Those two things—experiencing pain as a result of a revelation yet not wishing to un-know it—might appear to be in conflict with one another, but they’re not.

On the other hand, the perspectives of those being sought out—I refer to them as “seekees”—are not told nearly as much, and are not as well understood. Those who don’t want contact with genetic kin and don’t want these revelations uncovered are much less likely to want to tell their stories. There can be happy reunions between parents and children or between siblings, but sometimes there’s a painful clash of interests. A seeker approaching her genetic father may be seen as threatening by that father, or by that father’s wife, or by the children he raised. There may be shame, guilt, and embarrassment on the part of the genetic father or mother. The decision not to have a relationship with a child or to even speak about having had a child may have been made fifty, sixty years ago, in far different and perhaps desperate circumstances. These are such sad and difficult situations for everyone. In a perfect world, there would be family mediators to help with those initial conversations, and mental health counselors to help everyone—those discovering family secrets, and the keepers of those family secrets. I am heartened to see a growing community of mental health professionals specializing in DNA surprises.

See our review of The Lost Family.BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles about the search and reunion, NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.

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 20^th 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 issues 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, observing that paternity bequeaths not only individuals’ names but also their identities, nationalities, and legitimacy.

Because a woman’s pregnancy and childbirth are observable, maternity historically has been undisputed. But before science developed the means to pinpoint with certainty the biological fact of fatherhood, it was well accepted that the mystery of paternity was impenetrable. And while paternity was understood to be truly unknowable or unverifiable, it could be assumed or claimed based on a man’s relationship to a child’s mother or his behavior toward a child. Paternity could be inferred from marriage. Likewise, a man’s acceptance of responsibility for a child supported the presumption of his paternity. In most cultures and throughout history, the role of father has been accorded to the men willing to perform it.

But the lack of certainty rendered claims of infidelity insupportable and legal actions to hold putative fathers accountable unprovable. At the same time, this ambiguity upheld certain social orders, for example, it gave cover to white slave owners who impregnated slaves with impunity.

In the early 20^st century, myriad methods were developed to attempt to scientifically determine paternity. They were efforts to prove the male’s body contained the evidence and to shift paternity from a social construct—a designation based on relationships and behavior—to one based in biology. These included hereditary blood grouping, crystallography, fingerprints, genetic paternity testing, and measurements of the electronic vibrations through the blood using a machine called an oscillophore. But it wasn’t until scientific testing techniques were refined and DNA testing reached a standard of reliability that the biological fact of paternity became indisputable. Paternity thenceforth would be based on genes rather than social or political determinations. Earlier notions of identity and kinship gave way to a new standard.

The use of science to yield conclusive proof of paternity, which, Milanich says, arose from eugenics and race science, had wide application and significant repercussions. It was desirable, for example, to government agencies that sought to reduce welfare spending by shifting the financial burden to the scientifically demonstrated fathers. These techniques might be used to hold a deadbeat dad accountable, shame an unfaithful woman and strip her of her rights, or uphold privilege and paternalism.

Contemporary headlines about fertility fraud and the ethical minefields surrounding assisted reproduction support the author’s argument that despite decades of efforts by scientists to determine the criteria for establishing and legitimizing paternity, the task remains as difficult as it’s ever been. Further, society has leaned back toward a view of paternity and parenthood dictated by behaviors and responsibilities, as demonstrated by the acceptance of same-sex parenting. The experience of NPEs (not parent expected), as well, demonstrates that DNA doesn’t settle the matter of paternity once and for all. Countless individuals who’ve discovered biological fathers through DNA testing have been rejected by those fathers and may have no legal recourse. And on the flip side, in many if not most cases, men who learn through DNA that they are not the biological fathers of their children continue to fulfill the social role and responsibilities understood as those of a father. They may do so through a sense of duty, because they’re legally bound to be accountable, or because all parties involved believe fatherhood is a matter the heart, not of cells.

DNA testing has made it possible for many adoptees, donor-conceived individuals, and NPEs to discover their origins—a fundamental right asserted in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. But Milanich also explores the darker side of what she terms biological essentialism, detailing the ways in which paternity science was used for baser purposes and in a discriminatory manner, for example in Nazi Germany to determine race, or in the United States during the Cold War to expose Chinese immigrants claiming bloodlines to U.S. citizens. This discussion is especially resonant in light of current events—the government’s plan to use new rapid DNA testing of immigrants in detention facilities on the southern U.S. border, for example, or the Israel High Court granting permission for the use of DNA tests to verify Jewishness.

Those who have had DNA surprises leading to genetic identity confusion may take issue with the way their experience is described as a repetitive story line in the media—”the trope of identity lost and found”—or with the author’s suggestion that what she calls “Big Paternity” has commercialized doubt and is involved in “creating and perpetuating narratives of rampant “paternal misattribution.” Nevertheless, she raises important questions that are worth examining. She concludes that DNA hasn’t settled the matter of paternity. “It was not a lack of knowledge that produced the quest for the father; the quest was always a social and political one. The truly significant question about paternity is thus not an empirical one—who is the father?—but a normative one—what do we want him to be? Which criteria whose interests, intentions, or desires, should define paternity?”

Milanich, a skilled storyteller, offers a fascinating social history, from the earliest times and across cultures to the rise of Big Paternity, as exemplified by the “Who’s Your Daddy?” truck that winds through the streets of New York City providing mobile DNA testing, and, of course, the ubiquity of direct-to-consumer DNA testing. This deeply researched and engaging exploration will likely challenge readers’ notions about paternity and shift their perspectives. As the author explained in a recent Barnard College interview, “Tracing the rise of testing illuminates changing ideas about family, sexuality, childhood, race, nationhood, and identity.”B.K. JacksonLook for more book reviews here, and find more articles about genetic identity here. Is there a book, film, or podcast you’d like to review? Check out our submission guidelines.

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. Both intrigued and disturbed, he pressed her to reveal what she knew, but she was determined to say nothing until both of their parents had died. Her refusal only deepened his resolve to learn more.

Anderson learned to eavesdrop, and “parked” himself so he could hear what his aunts and older siblings were talking about. It was clear the family was hiding something, but the substance of the secrets remained a mystery. When Mark died, Stephen tried once again to nudge Holly into coming clean, but she was steadfast. She wouldn’t discuss anything until their mother was gone. His hopes of unraveling the mysteries were dashed when Holly died a few months before their mother did and took the secrets to her grave.

With Holly’s death, Anderson says, they lost a part of their family history, and he double-downed on his desire to know more. What he couldn’t have known as he resolved to get to the source of the rumors and whispers, however, was just how many family secrets he’d uncover or how twisted and tangled they were.

If anyone was well-equipped to sleuth a family mystery, it was Anderson. His avocation as a family historian, education in family and community history and library science, and his long career working in one of the leading genealogy companies—Family Search, International—gave him tools and knowledge others might not have had. Still, it was a challenge even to find the puzzle pieces let alone figure out how to put them together. And none of his education or work experience prepared him for the shock and emotional upheaval he experienced after he ultimately uncovered the truth.

Anderson and his brother Tim suspected that one of their siblings was an NPE. Their suspicions arose before autosomal DNA testing had become available, but they found an ally in an employee of private laboratory that offered other forms of DNA testing. In an effort to create a baseline—a genetic standard against which to measure the family relationships—they determined to get DNA samples from their parents. Their father died before they were able to accomplish their mission, but with help from a funeral director, they obtained a hair sample and were able to have it analyzed. Their mother provided a sample without hesitation. Anderson had no doubt that he was Mark’s son or that he and Tim were full brothers. They looked alike and both, especially Tim, looked like their dad. Still, he wanted to learn about his risks for hereditary diseases that ran in Mark’s family, so he submitted a sample of his own DNA.

When the results came in weeks later, Anderson recalls, his world was turned upside in one phone call. The good news was that he had no markers for the stomach cancer and diabetes he worried about developing. The bad news was that Mark was not his biological father. “Science and technology had stripped me of whatever sense of identity I thought I had,” he recalls. “I had no clue who I was.” He felt sucker punched. He couldn’t breathe and thought he might vomit. He was overwhelmed by feelings of rage, contempt for his mother, and the sense of having been betrayed. “It felt like my whole world was coming down around me,” he writes. He thought about having worried for so many years about the wrong hereditary diseases, all his genealogical research on a family to which he was no longer tethered, the way his father might react, and who his biological father might be.

Anderson couldn’t accept the results, and at the suggestion of the DNA lab, he gathered the hair chamber of his deceased father’s electric razor and had the shavings tested. He was gutted when the test results duplicated those of the initial test. He describes himself as having been on an emotional rollercoaster, but he soon found he was only at the beginning of the ride. To avoid a full-blown spoiler, let’s just say that Anderson wasn’t the only NPE in the family and that over time he was able to get to the bottom of most of the whispers and rumors he’d heard his whole life.

Don’t expect a literary memoir from “A Broken Tree.” It doesn’t boast an artful narrative structure or strive for deep character reflection and analysis. The author doesn’t aspire to crafting elegant prose or stringing graceful sentences. The text suffers in spots from repetition, and you may find it difficult at points to locate events in time and place. And yet it’s a compelling and extraordinary story of genetic disconnect, a page-turner in many spots. Readers are likely to be enthralled by the author’s experience and amazed—even inspired—by his determination to lay bare his family’s truth and his persistence. The book reads as testimony, and those who have had their own DNA surprises will nod in recognition, commiserating with the author at the same time that he validates their feelings about their experiences.

By B.K. JacksonAuthor 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. She didn’t know what she didn’t know, but she was certain there were secrets. Already, she had an untamed curiosity, an urgent need to shed light on those unknowns, and an intuitive understanding of the ways of a writer. She eavesdropped, snooped, and struggled to get to the bottom of things. “I didn’t know that this spying was the beginning of a literary education,” she writes. “That the need to know, to discover, to peel away the surface was a training ground for who and what I would grow up to become.”

But when she grew up, one thing she never felt a need to get to the bottom of was her story of origin. Despite the blond hair and striking blue eyes that almost daily brought the same comment — “You don’t look Jewish” — she had no doubt about where she came from and who her people were. She took enormous pride in being the progeny of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, revered leaders in their communities. “They are the tangled roots — thick, rich, and dark — that bind me to the turning earth.” She was grounded by her Orthodox heritage, its traditions touchstones in her life that tethered her to her father, Paul, whom she adored and whose sadness captivated her. She felt no such tenderness toward her mother, Irene, with whom she had a tenuous relationship. As a child, she says, “I’d had the fantasy — a form of hope, now a staggering irony — that she wasn’t actually my mother.” She told their stories in fiction and in memoir, examining the family as one might a jewel, holding it to the light and observing both its beauty and its flaws.

Although Shapiro had no curiosity about her lineage, when her husband, Michael, who wanted to learn more about his own ancestry, ordered a test for each of them, she went along gamely. But she absorbed its results in stages, in a haze of denial. She was stunned to learn she was only 52% European Jewish and mystified by a match to a first cousin she knew nothing about. Soon after, Michael bounded up the stairs one evening with his laptop in his hands — the rhythm of his steps signaling something urgent — announcing that her half sister Susie, her father’s older daughter, had sent the results of her DNA test, the import of which he’d already gleaned. Shapiro and Susie shared no DNA. This quickly led to the unthinkable yet indisputable conclusion that Shapiro was not the child of the father she adored — the man who died many years earlier after having been in a horrific car crash, whose influence and presence in her life, even now, she cherishes every day.

Readers who’ve experienced similarly staggering DNA surprises can guess exactly what came next — a call to AncestryDNA — because surely there must have been a mistake. The vials must have been switched. But of course they weren’t. As Shapiro acknowledges, “Millions of people have had their DNA tested by Ancestry, and no such mistake has ever been made.” As denial faded, questions bloomed: “If my father wasn’t my father, who was my father? If my father wasn’t my father, who was I?”

“Still Writing” was written long before Shapiro’s life was upended by this shocking revelation. Rereading it now, I’m struck by her prescience. Her thoughts point like arrows toward a future she couldn’t have guessed would come to pass. In the opening pages she writes, “Secrets floated through our home like dust motes in the air. Every word spoken by my parents contained within it a hard kernel of what wasn’t being said.” Among the things that weren’t being said were that her parents had had difficulty conceiving and sought treatment at a sketchy fertility clinic in the shadow of the University of Pennsylvania. Its director, Dr. Edmond Farris, who practiced medicine without a license, had devised a new technique for detecting ovulation that allowed men to provide sperm for artificial insemination at the ideal window of opportunity. The clinic, as did others of that era, mixed donor sperm with the husbands’ sperm to boost the chances of conception while at the same time give the couples reason to believe it was possible the husbands’ sperm prevailed to fertilize the eggs.

The technique — aptly and understatedly — was called confused artificial insemination. The truth was easy to disguise. In those years, no one could have imagined a future in which anyone could spit in a tube, pull back the curtain on such deception, and nullify any promise of anonymity that had been given the sperm donors.

Many who’ve used DNA results to find family will be stunned by the velocity of Shapiro’s success. Within 36 hours, with the help of her journalist husband and a genealogy-savvy acquaintance, she identified her biological father, who’d been a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. But that discovery may never have happened had Shapiro not dredged up a shard of memory — a vaguely recollected offhand comment her mother had dropped like a grenade many years earlier about a fertility clinic in Philadelphia. What Shapiro does with that information kickstarts an inquiry into the facts of her origins, the ethics of donor conception, the potential consequences of revealing her secret, and — most compelling — the nature of genetic inheritance.

Don’t worry. There’s no spoiler alert needed. The facts aren’t what drives the narrative. Rather, it’s Shapiro’s tender dissection of the fallout of those facts that make “Inheritance” a page turner. As she wonders whether she’ll ever meet her biological father, she ruminates about what actually transpired, what her parents knew, and what it meant to them. And she reaches out to elderly relatives, doctors, religious leaders, and experts in donor conception to answer the question that tortures her: had her parents lied to her or had they themselves been deceived? She withstands an avalanche of grief and emerges to dig deep into the bigger questions. Who is she now? How will it change her relationships? What are the ethical issues associated with anonymity in donor conception? What is it that makes us who we are? What does it mean to forge a new identity and craft a new personal narrative in midlife? How do we live with uncertainty? And, above all, what does it mean to be a father?

An extraordinarily skilled and graceful writer, Shapiro performs a sleight of hand. She makes the reader feel as if she’s pulled up a chair and said, “Let me tell you what happened to me.” The story unfolds as naturally as a conversation between friends over many cups of coffee. But “Inheritance” is no simple recitation of facts. It’s a careful construction, equal parts brilliant detective story and philosophical inquiry.

One doesn’t need to have had a similar shock to be moved to tears by Shapiro’s sorrow and distress. Those who have traveled a similar path, however, may read breathlessly, with a lump in their throats. They may feel, as I did, that Shapiro eavesdropped on their conversations, got inside their skin, echoed their words, channeled their every emotion. “Inheritance” will linger in the minds of all who have yearned to belong and resonate with anyone who’s struggled to answer the question, “Who am I?”