Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

Secrets and their corrosive power. Secrets we keep from one another in the name of love.

All my life I had known there was a secret. What I hadn’t known: the secret was me.

“Your father is still your father.”

Bessel van der Kolk: “The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.”

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

Confirmation bias—a psychological term I had never heard before but one with which I will become intimately familiar—is the process by which the mind seeks to confirm what it already believes. When in the throes of confirmation bias, we seek and interpret information that will allow us to continue to hold on to our beliefs, even when presented with contradictory evidence.

You’ll never know was unacceptable. You’ll never know simply could not be what I was left with in the end. Who was I without my history?

Above all, I wanted to eradicate this terrible shame, this sense of being defective, alien, other, as if perhaps I never should have existed at all.

I may only have one, but I hit the jackpot, she would say. As if it were a lottery. She had won me. I was her prize.

“Knowing what you know, you’re more of a daughter to Paul than you can 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.”

Later, it will occur to me that Ben Walden felt, to me, like my native country. I had never lived in this country. I had never spoken its language or become steeped in its customs. I had no passport or record of citizenship. Still, I had been shaped by my country of origin all my life, suffused with an inchoate longing to know my own land.

Only a sense of having been visited by some kind of grace.

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”

“There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.”