Fifty-four years old, happily married, a teenage son, a successful career--what might it take to create an existential crisis?
For Dani Shapiro, it was finding out that her beloved but deceased father, the parent to whom she'd felt closest, was not her biological father. She was conceived by artificial insemination in a laboratory in Philadelphia after her parents had struggled for years to have a child. A donor's sperm was mixed with her father's, as was the accepted "treatment" at the time. The result was that the donor was her actual father.
She becomes consumed with trying to find out if her parents knew that the "treatment" had given her a different father. Did they lie to her? By this time, both her parents had died. She could remember fragments of conversations with them about her different physical features, about the circumstances of her birth, but they had never hinted in any way that she was not her father's daughter. She questions her father's relatives and his friends to try to learn the truth but they really cannot help her.
But they do. Her family friends and relatives are supportive and loving, and they reiterate the nobility of her father. They do tell her all she needs to know.
Or do they? What does she really want?
For all her researching tenacity, there are huge questions that she avoids, perhaps because she has no personal interest in the answers. We find out nothing about her mother's lineage or extended family, which is apparently still Shapiro's own. That being said, we never learn if Shapiro even attempted to confirm the DNA findings with her mother's living relatives.
Why did she not try different DNA tests? Why is she only interested in her paternal line?
This is a well-written memoir, honest and revealing, but it leaves the reader with much to consider. Being a memoirist, that can be a good thing for Dani Shapiro.
This book is part of the Mississauga Library System's 2020 Raves and Faves collection.
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