Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

Susie was my much-older half sister, my father’s daughter from an early marriage. We weren’t close, and hadn’t spoken in a couple of years, but I had recently written to ask if she had ever done genetic testing.

Our father had died in a car accident many years earlier, when I was twenty-three, and Susie thirty-eight.

Such was my certainty that I knew exactly where I came from.

The numbers, symbols, unfamiliar terms on the screen were a language I didn’t understand. It had taken 0.04538 seconds—a fraction of a second—to upend my life. There would now forever be a before.

These ancestors are the foundation upon which I have built my life. I have dreamt of them, wrestled with them, longed for them. I have tried to understand them. In my writing, they have been my territory—my obsession, you might even say. They are the tangled roots—thick, rich, and dark—that bind me to the turning earth.

Millions of people have had their DNA tested by Ancestry.com, and no such mistake has ever been made.

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.

All my life I had known there was a secret. What I hadn’t known: the secret was me.

People are doing DNA testing just for kicks, and getting the shock of their lives. There was such a culture of secrecy. Sometimes the mother tells after the father has died. Other times, there’s a letter left in a safe-deposit box.”

kept reminding myself that everything I had built—my family, my personhood—was unaltered.

“You can say, ‘This is impossible, terrible.’ Or you can say, ‘This is beautiful, wonderful.’ You can imagine that you’re in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home.”