An inconvenient truth

But here I was. An inconvenient truth that had indeed been born from his own body. A consequence of his actions. A wholly unique human being whose life continued to evolve long after his "donation" was made. My very existence was due to the fact that he never dreamt he'd have to deal with such a thing.

Dani Shapiro, Inheritance

Dani Shapiro says that throughout her youth she would spend long periods looking into a mirror wondering who that was staring back at her. Not until she is in her fifties does she learn the answer, as she describes so movingly in Inheritance, a memoir published in 2019.

The daughter of Orthodox Jewish parents in New Jersey, it always seemed unorthodox that she had blonde hair, blue eyes and light skin. Still she never questioned her parentage until a DNA test, taken as a lark, revealed that her beloved father wasn't her biological father. How could that be? Aided by her husband, she begins an investigation that leads her to a somewhat shady "test tube baby" operation at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s and eventually to a prominent aging doctor in Portland, Ore., who as a medical student at Penn had donated some of his sperm.

Her book reveals not just the details of her probe of her origins but also her own feelings about all this. In one sweet irony, she reveals that she and her husband once considered artificial insemination as a way to have a second child. Telling her son about the living grandfather he didn't know he had is among the book's many highlights, although the true high point comes when she finally meets the man whose genes she carries.

Shapiro had a difficult relationship with her mother, which colors her narrative. Her family love seems to have been centered on her late father, making the results of that DNA test all the more shattering. She even seems at times to question her own Jewishness, even though she well knows Jewishness is passed down through the mother.

Shapiro, whom I heard do a reading from this book in St. Petersburg in 2020, now does a popular podcast about family secrets. This is a subject she certainly knows something about.