Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love
ISBN-10
0525434038
ISBN-13
9780525434030
Series
Inheritance
Category
Biography & Autobiography
Pages
272
Language
English
Published
2020-01-28
Publisher
Anchor
Author
Dani Shapiro

Description

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, novelist--"a writer of rare talent" (Cheryl Strayed)-- and host of the hit podcast Family Secrets, comes 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.

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