Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

I shall never get you put together entirely, Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. —Sylvia Plath, “The Colossus”

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. —George Orwell, 1984

Take a breath. Feel the fact of my own body. You’re still you, I tell myself, again and again and again.

Our life as mother and daughter had been fraught and contentious, devoid of the easy love I felt for my father.

Oh how strongly I relate to this.

It felt to me, in the months it took to write that piece, that I was gluing my father back together.

Don’t like that.

“Your father is still your father.”

A point of fact.

Jesus. She is annoying. Can we stop bemoaning and move on?

“Your mother was Jewish. Jewish egg, Jewish woman giving birth, the child would be Jewish. There would have been no need to convert you.”

Page 104 before she gets to this. After 103 pages of moaning and groaning? Ugh. Hard eye roll.

that she and I were not threads in the same tapestry; that we were not related by blood; that her much-adored older brother was not my father.

I don’t know if I can finish this damn book. Family is not only blood and DNA. It’s determination and love and a joining of spirits by choice.

Once again I became that child standing outside the warmly lit houses of my neighbors, alone in the fading dusk, longing to be invited inside.

Okay so I’m about 55% through and so about 30% has been complaining that your family isn’t really your family but like your parents were shitty. Of course you love them but they were shitty. And you’re “devastated?” I don’t buy it. I don’t buy what you are selling at all.

But he was someone who spent his life thinking about medical ethics. And ultimately, this was an ethical question if there ever was one. What did I owe him? What did he owe me? Who were we to each other?

I mean great questions so maybe I’ll keep going?

That girl did not know who her father was.

Holy fuck!! Like Jesus. Yes you DO. Maybe not biologically but blood is not the only important thing.

What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood?

Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life.

“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 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?”

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.

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.”

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.”