Ethicists, religious scholars, lawyers, even many physicians believed it to be unlawful and immoral. There seemed to be communal outrage about donor insemination in the years surrounding my conception. The language was archaic and devastating, like something from a science fiction comic book. I could hardly bring myself to read them. I already had a pile of articles from the 1940s through the early 1960s about Dr.

I ordered all sorts of books, which would be waiting for me back home, packages stacked on our front porch. Timely and unforgettable, Dani Shapiro's memoir is a gripping, gut-wrenching exploration of genealogy, paternity, and love.Įach time I felt strong and resolved enough, I typed various search terms into Google. 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 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. 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. She woke up one morning and her entire history-the life she had lived-crumbled beneath her.

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. What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?

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