Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

Lines from a Delmore Schwartz poem come to mind: “What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest day; / Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn.”

when it comes to memoir, 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.

I was not who I thought I had been. But I was who I had always been.

never could have articulated it, like

Pru u’rvu. Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the world. The first words God spoke to human beings in Genesis.

clung to the only story I could tolerate.

How could it have been that I felt so close to my father but not at home in his world?

everything I had built—my family, my personhood—was unaltered. My new knowledge changed both everything and nothing.

In which—in legal terms—it was often considered adultery, and the child a bastard.

“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.”

“You have to judge things by the result,” Shirley continued. “And the result in which you can exult is that the very best was combined in you: grace, brains, creativity, beauty. Whatever alien, mechanical, outside element was in the story—it was a story of success. You have such a rich endowment. You have been so recompensed. You carry the heightened sensitivity, to be sure. You carry the pain and you also carry the reward.”

“Sweetheart, this opens up a world of inclusiveness—and in the end, you have to include yourself. You aren’t bleeding color. You’re holding the light ones and the dark ones. They’re all yours. Ultimately, in all of this, Dani—the postscript is that it’s really called love.”

“Do you know the three great spiritual questions?” he asked. My eyes were closed, stinging from my disclosure, as they often did. “Who am I?” I

“Why am I here?”

how shall I live?”

It is a measure of true adulthood that we are able to imagine our parents as the people they may have been before us.

Both of us, shy, strong, quiet, loyal, sensitive. Both of us, serious about our work, fierce about our kids, devoted to our long-lasting female friendships. I’m trying to be more intentional of late, to reconnect with the important people in my life. I’m home alone, a rare and savory occurrence.

“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.”

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.

Abraham said it to God when he was asked to bind Isaac, and repeated it in response to his son. Jacob said it when he answered the call of an angel. Joseph said it to Jacob when he was sent to seek his brothers. Moses found his voice and said it to God at the burning bush. And I say it to my father, again and again. Hineni. I am here. All of me.

Tattoo Of hinei