Inheritance

This was recommended to me by Deb of The Book Stop - as part of a recommendation service she offered. It was a great choice! I was enthralled by Shapiro's journey as she discovered and dealt with the fact that she had been a donor-conceived child, and how that hidden fact had shaped her life. It's fascinating to consider that we can build up a whole mental world for ourselves, as she did with her assumption that she was the biological child of an Orthodox Jewish father and product of his family line, that turns out to be an illusion. Shapiro has to deal with the psychological repercussions of this, as well as with the feelings of lostness and not belonging that she has had from childhood. She has to remake her shattered world and find a new relationship to much she had taken for granted.

Strangely, she never seemed to admit the idea that her not looking Jewish could mean she had been the product of an affair, even as she sensed something was wrong – with her, she assumed, not with the facts of her conception. The more complicated answer led her to a search for her biological father, a near obsession of which she gives us a blow-by-blow (or rather email-by-email) account. Another oddity is that though this obsession involves an acute awareness of how similar she is to her biological father, she never talks about her similarity to her biological mother. This may be because she was a sick, twisted narcissist whom Shapiro came to hate, but it seems to be a matter of protesting too much, or maybe too little. If you're going to put so much weight on one side of the biological equation, you need to also look at the other.

I was not aware of the murky history of donor conception, nor mindful of the ethical implications today. That was also very interesting to learn about.

In the end Shapiro finds peace with her heritage and returns her father to his rightful place in her heart. She dedicates the book to him, and I have no doubt he would be proud of her.