Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

what does it mean when the I am breaks down at the very beginning of the list?

You want the story of your conception to be at the very least corporeal.

Nope, definitely never had this desire

My psychoanalyst half sister was expressing a very deep and perhaps not wholly conscious wish: she would have preferred that I had not been born.

Um wat

How old was too old to blow up the past, rather than keep it intact?

when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own.

it can be more difficult to write about the dead than to write about the living.

a world-famous medium the FBI frequently uses as a resource in solving complex cases.

You said what now

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

I was insanely, unreasonably impatient.

It is the nature of trauma that, when left untreated, it deepens over time.

“The nature of trauma,” van der Kolk had said, “is that you have no recollection of it as a story. The nature of traumatic experience is that the brain doesn’t allow a story to be created.”

What do we inherit, and how, and why?

My unconscious mind had shaped stories out of its own rough landscape.

the dead are able to observe the living with compassion but not emotion.

gratitude and trauma weren’t mutually exclusive.

“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.”

My ancestors, scattered far and wide. There could be confusion in that—or liberation. The choice was mine.

secrets, particularly the most deeply held ones, have a way of leaching into everything surrounding them.

“We learn the grammar of our being before we grasp the rules of our language.”

By my being willing not to know thoroughly who I am and where I come from, the rigid structures surrounding my identity might begin to give way, leaving behind a sense of openness and possibility.