Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

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.

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.

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 by their nature documentable.

Students sometimes tell me that they’re waiting for someone to die before they feel they can write their story. They say this sheepishly, guiltily. As if, in some way, they’re wishing for that person to expire, already, so they can get on with the business of writing about them. I try to liberate my students from these tortured thoughts by telling them that they may as well just start now, because it can be more difficult to write about the dead than to write about the living. The dead can’t fight back. The dead have no voice. They can’t say: But that isn’t how it was. You’re getting it wrong. They can’t say: But I loved you so. They can’t say: I had no idea.

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

We never know who we will be in the burning building, the earthquake. We never know until we are faced with our own stripped-down, elemental selves.

insemination.

I was an unpleasant aftereffect of an action so inconsequential to him that it didn’t even bear recalling. A bit of space debris, the flotsam and jetsam resulting from a meaningless, young person’s choice.

wanted to tell her that grief—particularly the phenomenon known as complicated grief—runs its own course in its own time. But it was hard for me to allow myself that same compassion now. I tried to tuck my sorrow away each day as I taught, went to the beach, biked around town, ate lobster rolls on Commercial Street with Michael and Jacob—but when I awoke each morning it was to the wallop of shock and the remembering all over again as if for the first time.

“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 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.”

On each of my birthdays as an adult, I was meant to call her—it never occurred to me that it was usually the other way around—and thank her for having me. But here were the noxious fumes, leaking from beneath the sealed door where the truth resided.