Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.

Lookstein spoke fondly of my father. It was comforting to be in the presence of someone who had known him. There were so few people left.

“You can say, ‘This is impossible, terrible.’ Or you can say, ‘This is beautiful, wonderful.’ You can imagine that you’re in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home.”

secrets, particularly the most deeply held ones, have a way of leaching into everything surrounding them.

I was beginning to see the danger in adhering to a single narrative, hewing to a story. The peril wasn’t only in getting it wrong. It was in a kind of calcification, a narrowing, a perversion of reality that hardened and stilled the spirit.

Jack Kornfield often begins his meditations by saying, “Take your seat beneath the tree of enlightenment, halfway between heaven and earth.”