A LOS ANGELES TIMES, BOSTON GLOBE, WALL STREET JOURNAL, and NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR according to Elle, Real Simple, and Kirkus Reviews
“Memoir gold: a profound and exquisitely rendered exploration of identity and the true meaning of family.” —People Magazine
“Beautifully written and deeply moving—it brought me to tears more than once.”—Ruth Franklin, The New York Times Book Review
From the acclaimed, best-selling memoirist, novelist—“a writer of rare talent” (Cheryl Strayed)— and host of the hit podcast Family Secrets, comes a memoir about the staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test: an exploration of the urgent ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love.
What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?
In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her. Inheritance is a book about secrets--secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in--a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.
I was familiar with Dani Shapiro and her story before I read this book, thanks to her podcast Family Secrets. This book is the story of her Family Secret -- that her father isn't her biological father.
On its face, this really isn't an unusual situation. Tons of people find out at some point that the people they thought were their biological parents aren't. But there are a few things here that make this situation a little more interesting.
The issue at the core of Dani's parentage isn't an affair, but rather infertility during a time when such things really weren't talked about. Her parents had trouble conceiving, and ended up at what was possibly an "under-the-table" clinic in Philadelphia. Further complicating matters is the fact that both of Dani's parents are dead, so she can't get her many questions directly answered.
The book is not only about Dani's search for her biological father, but also her search for why this was such a secret, and how this secret have affected her parents' relationship and her own upbringing. I found it to be an enjoyable read.
