Inheritance, Dani Shapiro, Alfred A Knopf, 2019, 252 pp
Partial Summary From Goodreads:
The acclaimed and beloved author of Hourglass
now gives us a new memoir about identity, paternity, and family
secrets—a real-time exploration of the staggering discovery she recently
made about her father, and her struggle to piece together the hidden
story of her own life.
In the spring of 2016,
through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her
DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her
father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her
entire history—the life she had lived—crumbled beneath her.
My Review:
I was not as blown away by this memoir as most readers seem to have been. It was my first time reading Dani Shapiro and I don't guess we have much in common as far as worldview and emotional concerns go. That is alright. It happens to me with real live people I meet as well.
I was fascinated to learn some history about artificial insemination. In the 1950s it was as messed up as any other aspect of reproduction, sex, and the effects of all that on women. Dani Shapiro's mother, as portrayed in the book, made me think of the wife in John Williams's Stoner.
The more fraught subject for me is the intersection of genealogy, genetic engineering and eugenics. Richard Powers took that on in his 2009 novel Generosity. I just don't trust the human race and our science in a world that still has atomic arsenals, active White Supremacists and Fascism, to do anything but harm with genetic engineering.
Aside from the writing, which I found a bit weak and sometimes overwrought, Dani Shapiro did enlist my sympathies as she described her childhood, her deep feelings of not fitting in to her Jewish family, and her confusions about her relationship with her father. I could not predict how I would have reacted to the news she got or how I would have dealt with it.
Thus the book was not a waste of my reading time. It left me with empathy for people in my life who had to search for their birth parents. I used to feel so out of place in my family while growing up that I wondered if I had been adopted and they just hadn't told me yet.
DNA tests are throwing up a number of those stories. I did think about having one (to show one way or another if the romantic image of my ancestry is true or not) but I'm wondering if I actually want to know or not!
ReplyDeleteI know. It is a true Pandora's Box!
DeleteThanks for the review, but it does sound like a book I will skip! I've never read anything by Dani Shapiro before, but heard about her.
ReplyDeleteI had heard such glowing things, so now I have read her and made my own decision.
DeleteGreat review. Harold Bloom said something to the effect that the reason we read is to encounter people of all different kinds of opinions and worldviews.
ReplyDeletePersonally I do not think that Dani’s discovery would have made that much difference to me, but that is an example of everyone being different.
Thanks for the paraphrased words of Harold Bloom, Brian! Vive la difference.
DeleteIt's good to sometimes read a writer with a radically different worldview as it can give us insight into an unfamiliar way of thinking, as this book seems to have done for you. I share your distrust of our species in regard to human genetic engineering. That is indeed a fraught subject.
ReplyDeleteYes, we both find reading outside our worldview good! Fraught is the right word re human genetic engineering.
DeleteThat would be pretty crazy news to find out about one's father, ouch. The wife in the book Stoner was pretty bad as I recall. Heartless? Or self-absorbed?
ReplyDeleteYes, it would. The wife in Stoner was borderline psychotic as I recall, but I felt it was from oppressive upbringing as regards sensuality and womanhood, if I recall.
DeleteIt is a dangerous business and I do not trust the human race either. There will be designer babies in my lifetime, or Eleanor's by the latest, of this I am fairly certain. It is terrifying.
ReplyDeleteSo what did you think of all the secrecy in the story? That was created by that doctor, I thought.
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