PDF Inheritance A Memoir of Genealogy Paternity and Love Dani Shapiro 9781524732714 Books
Download As PDF : Inheritance A Memoir of Genealogy Paternity and Love Dani Shapiro 9781524732714 Books
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“A gripping genetic detective story, and a meditation on the meaning of parenthood and family.” —Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach
From the acclaimed, best-selling memoirist and novelist—“a writer of rare talent” (Cheryl Strayed)—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.
PDF Inheritance A Memoir of Genealogy Paternity and Love Dani Shapiro 9781524732714 Books
"I tried to like this book, I really did. I cannot stand how the author likens her situation to those suffering trauma. 1) your mother did not have an affair and not tell the person she was pregnant, 2) your mother didn't get pregnant by another man and make believe it was your fathers 3) you were not abandoned or adopted 4) two adults made a conscious decision to have fertility treatments and then raised you as their child (which you were) and loved you. 5) Why would you be mad at a total stranger for not wanting to meet you and let you invade his life. 6) you should be happy that this person was generous enough to donate his sperm so your parents could have a family, so you could have life and in turn, your son. It's shocking, yes...but the idea that after 54 years you were afraid your family would abandon you or your friends would treat you differently is absurd."
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Inheritance A Memoir of Genealogy Paternity and Love Dani Shapiro 9781524732714 Books Reviews :
Inheritance A Memoir of Genealogy Paternity and Love Dani Shapiro 9781524732714 Books Reviews
- I tried to like this book, I really did. I cannot stand how the author likens her situation to those suffering trauma. 1) your mother did not have an affair and not tell the person she was pregnant, 2) your mother didn't get pregnant by another man and make believe it was your fathers 3) you were not abandoned or adopted 4) two adults made a conscious decision to have fertility treatments and then raised you as their child (which you were) and loved you. 5) Why would you be mad at a total stranger for not wanting to meet you and let you invade his life. 6) you should be happy that this person was generous enough to donate his sperm so your parents could have a family, so you could have life and in turn, your son. It's shocking, yes...but the idea that after 54 years you were afraid your family would abandon you or your friends would treat you differently is absurd.
- As a medical student in the 1970s, I had classmates who picked up a little extra money by anonymously donating sperm for artificial insemination. The practice was normal by that point, moving away from the deep secrecy that shadowed Dani Shapiro's conception and childhood. Her reactions to the discovery of her concealed paternity and her search for meaning struck me as off-topic in what I'd expected to be a book about unraveling the mystery of her origins in a much more concrete way. That part was so quick and easy -- not the detective story I had anticipated. The rest was still a tale of mystery, but on a psycho-social plane. Who lied? Why? Who suspected the truth? How could Dani have ignored the hints? What does it mean to lose an identity that is tied to a false genealogy? How should an anonymous sperm donor react to being unmasked by DNA?
Extensive introspection wasn't what I thought I had signed up for when I bought this book, but it turned out to be fascinating enough that I read it in one sitting. - After finishing the last page of Dani Shapiro’s INHERITANCE A MEMOIR OF GENEALOGY, PATERNITY, AND LOVE, I wanted to take time to absorb what I had read. I’ve read and loved all her memoirs and I feel like this is her most stunning. The subject seems to be the most challenging, as far as a discovery and the path that it lead her on, the way in which she went about trying to find out what she needed to learn both about her subject and herself in order to write the book, and then, what she comes to understand about who she is in the process. Dani digs deep, as she always does in her books. Her writing, eloquent, as always, is also moving, has a conversational tone at times, open, easy. I was taken with her words. I felt them. Mostly her references to her childhood memories, and the Hebrew and religious moments that brought her back to her father. Not, that he ever left her.
Dani discovers, almost by accident, after her half-sister, mentions that she might want to take a DNA test, that their father is not her biological father. She is 54 when she learns this news. Looking back, there have been numerous hints over the course of her life, that she never pursued, that indicated that this might have been the case, but she never had reason to explore or question if her father was indeed her biological father. After all, she loved him. And, this is not something that occurs to most people. Even if she felt that she didn’t belong, in the sense of feeling different or looking different, her father was her person and her family, her people.
What she pieces together, along with the help of her husband, other members of her remaining extended family, and elderly friends of her long-deceased father, is remarkable.
I cried so often over the course of reading the book. For Dani's memory and what it would become or how it would be altered and for her love of a man who seemed bigger than life both during the time that he was alive and long after he died. For her caring, loving, and insightful elderly aunt who summed up Dani’s existence and place in their family with words that any person, lost or otherwise, deserves to hear and her display of true love that I hope envelop her for the rest of her years. For the miracle of science and social media, despite its weaknesses, how it can bring people together in ways we could never have imagined.
INHERITANCE is the experience of family dynamics, medical ethics, the culture of Orthodox Judaism, the wonder of memory, and complicated grief. - As someone who discovered thru my Ancestry DNA test close to age 40 that I was the product of artificial insemination, this story indeed struck a chord with me. Contrary to one of the comments above about there not being secrecy in the 1970s, there was indeed secrecy well into the 1980s regarding the use of donor sperm from med students/residents and the practice of artificial insemination. There are no records available to many donor-conceived adults conceived thru the late 1980s. Recipient parents were told that secrecy was of the utmost importance and never to tell the children conceived this way. It astounds me that so little thought was going into a practice that was creating human beings. Dani eloquently writes about feelings and deeply personal reflections that I myself have felt. Please remember that donor-conceived people are people with feelings and it is a basic human right to want to know where you came from. We did not ask to be created this way. If you know someone who is donor conceived or you yourself are, I highly recommend this book!
