ABOUT THIS BOOK

Adoption Memoirs tells inside stories of adoption that popular media miss. Marianne Novy shows how adoption memoirs and films recount not only happy moments, but also the lasting pain of relinquishing a child, the racism and trauma that adoptees such as Jackie Kay and Jane Jeong Trenka experienced, and the unexpected complexities of child-rearing adoptive parents Emily Prager and Jesse Green encountered.

Novy considers 45 memoirs, mostly from the twenty-first century, by birthmothers, adoptees, and adoptive parents, about same-race and transracial adoption. These adoptees, she recounts, wanted to learn about their ancestry and appreciated adoptive parents who helped. Birthmother Amy Seek shows why open adoption is not simple, and many other memoirs tell stories that continue past reunion.

Adoption Memoirs will enlighten readers who lack experience with adoption and help those looking for a shared experience to also understand adoption from a different standpoint.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Marianne Novy is Professor Emerita of English and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is author of Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama and editor of Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture.

REVIEWS

“Marianne Novy has given us a rich and powerful exploration of the deep and wide river that is adoption, separating and joining families. Her book is of value to all of us touched by adoption, and truly in some way we are all touched by adoption.”—Barbara Katz Rothman, Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York

"Novy’s voice rings out in the text through her passion for the subject and her own history…. [She] gives readers a full view of adoption — and leaves any judgment up to them…. Adoption Memoirs lays bare how America’s political infrastructure fails all families…. This book is an important work that treads new ground. It shows that 'happy endings' are something for fiction."—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“As Novy shows throughout her analysis of memoirs, this idealization of adoption as a panacea glosses over the complex relationships, identity formation trajectories, racial and cultural isolation, and various ambivalent emotions expressed by the key parties involved in adoption as a social practice: adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents.... Novy’s work provides an important contribution to cultural understandings of adoption and to the role of memoir and narrative in cultural construction.”—Contemporary Sociology

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Women Who Couldn’t Forget

2. Same-Race Identities: Seeking Ancestry, Exploring Relationships

3. Constructing Racial Identity: Seeking Ancestry, Exploring Relationships

4. Many Ways to Be an Adoptive Parent

Concluding Thoughts

Notes

Works Cited

Index

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