Inheritance a memoir of genealogy, paternity, and love
(2019)

Nonfiction

Large Type

Call Numbers:
LARGE TYPE/MEMOIR/SHAPIRO,D

Availability

Locations Call Number Status
Large Type LARGE TYPE/MEMOIR/SHAPIRO,D Available

Details

PUBLISHED
Waterville, Maine : Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company, 2019
EDITION
Large print edition
DESCRIPTION

359 pages (large print) ; 23 cm

ISBN/ISSN
9781432861803, 1432861808 :, 1432861808, 9781432861803
LANGUAGE
English
NOTES

"In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA, Dani Shapiro received the astonishing news that her beloved deceased father was not her biological father. Over the course of a single day, her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her. In just a few hours of Internet sleuthing, she was able to piece together the story of her conception and, remarkably, find a YouTube video of her biological father--his face and mannerisms eerily similar to her own. [This] 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 had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years. 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. Dani Shapiro's memoir unfolds at a breakneck pace--part mystery, part real-time investigation, part rumination on the ineffable combination of memory, history, biology, and experience that makes us who we are. A haunting interrogation of the meaning of kinship and identity, written with stunning intensity and precision--Dani Shapiro's most intimate and compelling work yet."--Dust jacket

Spring, 2016. Through a genealogy website to which she had submitted her DNA for analysis, Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. Her entire history crumbled beneath her. This is the story of her 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 on themes of identity and family history. She shows that science and technology may have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. -- adapted from back cover