inheritance a memoir of genealogy paternity and love

Only after those hundred pages is there a brief discussion that Jewish ancestry is passed through the mother's line. She has immediate access to information, many friends and colleagues with which to process news, and yet the first hundred pages of this book are fixated on the trauma of the discovery. While memoir is an inherently self-indulgent genre, I find Shapiro's unwillingness to examine her privilege very troubling. Shapiro mentions her role as writer again and again as well as her desire to make sense of her life. I thought this would be an interesting book similar to Carolyn Abraham’s The Juggler’s Children. Inheritance is a devastating and haunting interrogation of the meaning of kinship and identity, written with stunning intensity and precision. 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. 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. 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. Over the course of a single day, her entire history-the life she had lived-crumbled beneath her. In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had casually submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her beloved deceased father was not her biological father. “Memoir gold: a profound and exquisitely rendered exploration of identity and the true meaning of family.” - People From the acclaimed author of Signal Fires and host of the hit podcast Family Secrets : 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.

Inheritance a memoir of genealogy paternity and love