Dani Shapiro’s memoir, Inheritance, tells of her discovery at age 54, that her devoutly Orthodox Jewish father (many years deceased), was not her biological father. The discovery was made via genealogy testing, done for interest, almost a lark.
It wasn’t so much my future that was being irrevocably altered by this discovery – it was my past.
Apart from my long-held interest in genetics and epigenetics, this book gripped me for other reasons –
- my brother and I did the ancestry.com test a few years ago. We jokingly told our parents it was their last opportunity to reveal any secret children (there were no surprise siblings). The results were fascinating and we continue to talk about them (primarily because I am more ‘exotic’ than my brother i.e. a greater mix of regions than him, much to his chagrin).
- adoption is part of my extended family’s history. Knowing and not knowing the biological parents has had different impacts.
- being Welsh was very much part of my husband’s family story. Until they found out they weren’t Welsh at all. There was a smallish identity crisis.
How much of our cultural and familial history shapes our identity? I would argue lots (although the general message from critics of this book is ‘this information doesn’t fundamentally change who you are, get over it’). But, I take a relational view of self – that we are who we are within the context of our relationships to other people. Ultimately we operate in a ‘social’ world, where relationships, or the absence of them, shapes us.
Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are?
A quote from a book I read a few weeks ago (Olga by Bernhard Schlink) is relevant – History is not the past as it really was. It’s the shape we give it.
And Shapiro had given it much shape. Her Orthodox Jewish heritage was integral to her identity and, on learning the news of her biology, she says ‘…I felt cut loose from everything I had ever understood about myself…’. In the book, she she combs over memories that provided the ‘hints’ to suggest that her father was not her biological father.
I ran through the facts of my own identity again and again as if memorising a poem, or factors of an equation.
Apart from the focus on identity, there is the theme of grief and loss – it also relates to identify, but is more significantly expressed when Shapiro yearns to be able to speak to her parents – both deceased – about the circumstances of her birth.
I ached with grief, but this grief was not the sharp, suffocating grief that accompanies a recent death. It was a field of grief, a sea of it. There were no edges.
Shapiro muses that it is ‘….possible to live an entire life – even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine – and still not know the truth of oneself.’ Does this memoir help her get closer to the truth? Maybe, but not fully. What she does get – as one does with any kind of grief – is an adjustment. As I so frequently say in my work, the grief doesn’t ‘go away’, but we adjust around it.
4/5 Riveting.
…for whole minutes at a time, I was able to forget that the ground beneath me had cracked wide open. I ate the seafood paella, drank more than my share of wine. I laughed, told other, easier stories, clinked glasses…. It continues to seem oddly possible to go on living my life as if nothing had happened.
