Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

I didn’t have much to say to my mother. I never really had. Our life as mother and daughter had been fraught and contentious, devoid of the easy love I felt for my father.

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.

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