Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

I heard Shirley’s voice once again: Knowing what you know, you’re more of a daughter to Paul than you can possibly imagine. I may have been cut from the same cloth as Ben Walden, but I was and forever would be Paul Shapiro’s daughter. Haskel Lookstein’s voice joined Shirley’s in my head: Kol hakavod to your father. All the honor. If not for him, I would never have been born. I was connected to him on the level of neshama, which had nothing to do with biology, and everything to do with love.

I attended Dittrich’s lecture in part because I had long been interested in the history of neuroscience but also because the subtitle of his book—Patient H. M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets—caught my eye. His family’s secrets were very different from my own, but what he and I shared was the long lens through which we were forced to see the context of the times.

Highlighted because I’d also like to read this.

“I don’t want to be a presentist,” the author was saying. Presentism: the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. It would be easy to fall into such thinking. I had done so from the moment I discovered the truth of my identity. Those early months were taken up first with the disbelief that my parents could have ever knowingly participated in such a deceit, and then later with anger and sorrow that they had made the choices they did—even though those choices resulted in my existence. For a long while I was able to put myself in their shoes only as myself, product of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with all the biological, genetic, historical, and psychological tools available to me. But now I was coming to the awareness that my young parents-to-be had none of these tools. They possessed only their own fear, shame, despair, and desire for a child at any cost. They joined hands and went deeper into the wilderness until the only way out was through. There was no going back.

I often give advice to others (and to myself, as well!) that we can’t judge our past selves based on decisions we now think should have been made differently. We do the best we can with what we know, with what energy or willpower or awareness we have at the time. That past self cannot be judged or held liable for not doing better, because they did exactly what they were able to at the time.

My mother had always had a remarkable ability to bend reality to her will.

This is a little amusing to me because this is also a great way to describe something about my mom. In her case, it seemed to usually come from a place of love, which does not feel the same way the author thinks of her mother’s behavior. But, I remember my mom telling people about things that absolutely did not happen, because she wanted to ease their hurt or give them comfort in some way. It was kindness, but it was definitely a revision of the truth! There were also some times when she attributed motives to someone else’s behavior that led to hurt feelings. Like, in one long-term friendship, where another couple didn’t seem to extend the same hospitality to her that she had extended to them, she saw them as greedy or “using her,” where it was likely more accurate that they just thought she liked hosting, or perhaps they didn’t feel like their cooking was as good, or their home was as well-set-up for visitors. My mom’s story about what had happened became the Truth, though, as far as she was concerned. In retrospect, I wonder how many things in my life story were adjusted so the facts as I knew them were the way she wanted me to think about them. I would say I wish I could ask her, but because she was so sure of her views, I doubt she would have even been able to identify when that may have happened. It was just how she was.

A well-known and respected author on infertility insists that the “white lie” is a kindly, humane act. He wrote, “It is a violation like burning fallen leaves in the street so they will not scatter over the neighbor’s lawn. It is the type of offense to which the good accomplished, completely neutralizes the infraction of a law.

I can see where covering up someone’s origins being from a donor might have been seen that way, as a positive thing - similar to not telling people they were adopted. But in so many situations, if anyone else knows, eventually something will come out, even before the DNA services. It is so harmful to a person’s sense of identity to have something like that be a surprise.

and whatever sequelae there might have been to the unorthodox methods surrounding my conception vanished into the ether of magical thinking. If it wasn’t thought, it wasn’t so. If it wasn’t spoken, it hadn’t happened. Except that secrets, particularly the most deeply held ones, have a way of leaching into everything surrounding them. A psychoanalytic phrase—“unthought known”—became my instrument of illumination as I poked and prodded at my history with my parents. The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher Bollas, writes: “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.” —

If it wasn’t thought, it wasn’t so. If it wasn’t spoken, it hadn’t happened. Except that secrets, particularly the most deeply held ones, have a way of leaching into everything surrounding them.

psychoanalytic phrase—“unthought known”—became my instrument of illumination as I poked and prodded at my history with my parents. The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher Bollas, writes: “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.” —

“Unthought known” is such an interesting concept!

All my life—in addition to being asked how it was possible that I was Jewish—I was asked if Dani was my real name. Yes, I would say. It took too much out of me to explain. Sometimes I would add that I had never thought of myself as Daneile, not once, not even as a child. I never answered to it. But was this true? Try as I might, I couldn’t ask the child I once was what she understood about herself, in the grammar of her being, before the rules of her language set in.

Mildly relatable here - except in my case, the name I go by - my birth certificate name - is more commonly a diminutive nickname, and I’ve answered a similar question forever! To the point where at least one teacher told me I was wrong about my name being my whole name.

I replaced it with a piece by the artist Debbie Millman: a large, blown-up yellow legal pad on which, in the top corner, in her own script, are the words: This, just this. I am comfortable not knowing.

either all of us are accidents of history or none of us are. One sperm, one egg, one moment. An interruption—a ringing phone, a knock on the door, a flashlight through the car window—a single second one way or the other and the result would be an entirely different human being.

“We all feel as if we’re other,” he told me. “Any thinking person knows we are other. Only you’ve actually been to the front lines of otherness. And you’ve come back with something to teach us.”