Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

A Zen meditation made popular by the twentieth-century Indian sage Ramana Maharshi goes like this: the student begins by asking and answering the question Who am I? I am a woman. I am a mother. I am a wife. I am a writer. I am a daughter. I am a granddaughter. I am a niece. I am a cousin. I am, I am, I am.

The idea is that eventually, the sense of I am will dissolve. Once we’re past all our many labels and notions of what makes us who we think we are, we will discover that there is no I—no us. This will lead us to a greater understanding of the true nature of impermanence.

What never fail to draw me in, however, are secrets. Secrets within families. Secrets we keep out of shame, or self-protectiveness, or denial. Secrets and their corrosive power. Secrets we keep from one another in the name of love.

It turns out 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.

there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own.

I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person’s experience is not another’s. If five people in a family were to write the story of that family, we would end up with five very different stories.

These are truths of a sort—the truth of adhering to what one remembers. Then there are facts, which are...

We didn’t add up. And not because I wasn’t my father’s child but because I—and possibly one or both of my parents—had never known.

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

I had read dozens of books over the years ranging from complex psychoanalytic tomes to straight-up self-help as I tried to navigate the difficulties of being my mother’s daughter.

Bed was where I wanted to stay. Bed would continue to be a place from which I would try to navigate my ship in the gale.

Later, when I obsessively tell the details of this day dozens upon dozens of times—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.

Smile, Dani! Over here, Dani! Something tells me that this is important to my mother. That I had better perform, and perform well. That’s right, Dani! She would have pronounced my name, as she always did, as if it were slightly foreign and exotic, drawing out the a. Daaah-ni.

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.

In 1961, Edward Albee’s eviscerating play about a childless couple, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was about to open on Broadway.

A Newsweek survey revealed that zero percent of Americans considered no children the ideal family size.

In 1961 it had been only nine years since Watson and Crick had discovered DNA.

The thought of a future in which it would be possible to spit into a plastic vial and discover one’s genetic heritage would have been the stuff of science fiction.

But more than anything, what I aimed for was ease. I wanted to laugh with my son.

When people commented on the size of our family—which, amazingly, they did—my mother had a ready response. I can hear her voice as if she’s here in the room as I write these words. She would turn her beautiful, darting eyes on me, and I would feel pride. 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.

Until I was in my mid-thirties—I met Michael at thirty-four, and Jacob was born days after I turned thirty-seven—my inner world was defined and shaped by longing. This longing was vast, wide, and I was not able to put words to it. All I knew was what I felt, which was a constant, interior ache that propelled me.

Many children are curious about their parents’ private lives, but my ritual bordered on obsession.

I did everything I could to flee my parents. It pains me to write these words. They were all I knew of the world. And yet, I walked that poor dog up and down those unfortunately named suburban streets in search of a family who would open their door and take me in.

When you’re offered an easy moral out and you don’t take it, that’s malchus.” Meaning kingly.

I remembered the disorder in my mind, my intense desire to please, my lack of any clear sense of myself.

Dear Ben, In one of my favorite short stories, Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Become Responsibilities,” written on the eve of his 21st birthday, a secondary character addresses the narrator: “You will find that out soon enough, everything you do matters too much.” I

It is the nature of trauma that, when left untreated, it deepens over time. I had experienced trauma over the years and had developed ways of dealing with

“The nature of trauma,” van der Kolk had said, “is that you have no recollection of it as a story. The nature of traumatic experience is that the brain doesn’t allow a story to be created.”

“Who am I?” I whispered and paused. I couldn’t remember the other two. We were silent for a long moment. Outside his office, on the main street of Stockbridge, I could hear the whoosh of a passing car, the chirp of a lone bird.

Finally, he continued. “Why am I here?” Tears ran down my temples and into my hair. He paused before offering me the last question. “And how shall I live?”

Biological. Social. 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.

A guru told me—with a certainty I couldn’t help but envy—that the dead do not feel pain. When we die, she said, we survey it all: the whole complex human catastrophe we’ve left behind. We see patterns and designs from the great distance of death, and understand our life’s purpose, after the fact.

passage from the work of Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist teacher and writer whom I had long admired. “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.”

The principle holds that “entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.”

His life had been lived as if “no” had been shouted at him since the day he was born.

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.”

finger paintings of a little girl who depicted her mother as a jagged-toothed monster and herself as a small, shapeless blob.

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