Their trauma became mine – had always been mine. It was my inheritance, my lot. My parents' tortured pact of secrecy was as much a part of me as the genes that had been passed down.
As ought to flit through anyone's mind who sends away a DNA test “for fun”, when Dani Shapiro got her results back, she learned that her father – the man she had lost in a car accident thirty years earlier but who had remained the touchstone of her identity throughout her life – turned out not to be genetically related to her. How ironic a turn of events for a frequent memoirist (Inheritance is Shapiro's fifth): not only is Shapiro singularly well-trained to illuminate and interrogate the facts of her life, but this new information turns the spotlight back on her motivations – why else had she been so obsessed with her own life if not for the simple reason that she always suspected there was a dark secret to uncover? Shapiro is a talented writer and the details of her situation go beyond the routine – sometimes facts really are stranger than fiction, and in Shapiro's hands, they make for a fascinating story. (I read an ARC and quotes might not be in their final forms.)
There are many varieties of shock. This is something you don't know until you've experienced a few of them. I've been on the other end of a phone call hearing the news that my parents were in a car crash and both might not live. I've sat in a doctor's office being told that my baby boy had a rare and often fatal disease. I have felt the slam, the blade, the breathless falling – a physical sense of being shoved backwards into an abyss. But this was something altogether different. An air of unreality settled like a cloak around me. I was stupid, disbelieving. The air became thick sludge. Nothing computed.Because of Shapiro's and her journalist husband's contacts and resources, within thirty-six hours of learning of her DNA results, the pair were looking at her bio-father's Facebook page and wondering what to do with the information. Having been raised in an Orthodox Jewish family – and repeatedly told by family and strangers alike that the blue-eyed blonde Dani sure doesn't look Jewish – it was earth-shattering for her to now look at the photos of a strange man and see the planes and contours of her own face in them; to watch videos of him on his blog and see that he and she use the same hand gestures while delivering talks. It was particularly hard to see pictures of this man with a large, laughing family – celebrating Christmas no less – when her own childhood, as an only child in an unhappy home, had been so tense and lonely. Shapiro's mother was a pathological narcissist with a borderline personality disorder, her father was depressed and fragile, “consumed by his own sorrow”. As she writes about the instability of her homelife, “An invisible live wire stretched between my parents and me. Touch it, and we might all go up in smoke.”
Shapiro learns that her parents, who had met later in life (this was her father's third marriage), had had trouble conceiving and eventually used the service of a fertility clinic (at a time when artificial insemination was unregulated and of dubious legality). The question that most hounded Shapiro was: If an anonymous sperm donor was used to increase the couple's chances of conception, could her parents, and especially her father, have possibly known? As an Orthodox Jew – someone to whom blood links and heredity meant everything – how could he have accepted a non-Jewish child as his own? Although she at first had qualms about sharing her results (and especially among elderly family and friends of her father's), Shapiro's quest for the truth eventually saw her meeting with anyone her father may have confided in. And as shocking as this revelation must have been, I was amazed by how understanding everyone (from Rabbis to family) were. When Shapiro met with her father's sister – now in her 80s and the relative that Dani was most afraid of alienating – the old woman had soothing words for her niece that touched me:
Knowing what you know, you're more of a daughter to Paul than you could possibly imagine. You take something that isn't your own and you breathe life into it. You create it – and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.I'm purposefully not revealing any of the more strange details of Shapiro's journey because the in-the-moment revelations made for a compelling read. But I will add that she goes over the ethics of secrecy and anonymity and whether children have a right to full disclosure – in a world that's becoming ever more connected and open, how could decades-old guarantees of “secrecy” even be protected? With more and more of these DNA samples being sent off “for fun”, there are sure to be more skeletons rattling out of closets everywhere, but not everyone can make such a thoughtful and interesting memoir out of the bones.
