Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Kay Lynn Hartman

Author:   Dani Shapiro

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir

272 pages, published January 15, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Inheritance, serial memoirist Dani Shapiro writes about her discovery (through an over the counter genetic test that she took on a lark) that the man she thought was her biological father was not.  Shapiro takes the reader with her as she pieces together the hidden story of her own life and discovers new insights about her past and present identity.

Quotes 

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”

 

“It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life—even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine—and still not know the truth of oneself.”

 

“There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.”

 

“Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?”

 

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

 

“What do we inherit, and how, and why? The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens – that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube – formed me? I did not come from the line of small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands. The imprint of pogroms, of the difficulties and sorrows of immigrant life was not mine – at least not in the physical sense. But I had carried these things a long way in my heart. I was of that dusty and doomed Polish village – and I was not. What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood? I was made of three people: my mother, my father, Ben Walden. Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life.”

 

“After listening to my entire story, he quietly said: “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 Take

Inheritance is a book that really grew on me and that is in no small part due to the quality of the writing.  When I first started it, I found the author Dani Shapiro to be a bit overwrought in response to discovering that her biological father was a sperm donor.  However, as I got deeper into the book, I was able to relate more to her identity crisis.  I was also able to her speak at a Boulder Book Store author event and found her to be eloquent, empathetic and very moving.