Title: Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love
Author: Dani Shapiro
Published: January 15th 2019, Alfred A. Knopf
Status: Read November 2019
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My Thoughts:
In the Spring of 2016, fifty-four year old bestselling author and teacher Dani Shapiro, casually agreed to submit her DNA for testing through Ancestry.com, in support of her husband’s new found interest in genealogy. Dani is shocked when the results arrive and she learns that her late beloved father, could not possibly have been her biological father.
For Dani this is a particularly stunning blow, her identity has always been very closely tied to her paternal Ashkenazi Jew heritage (a subject she has explored extensively in her previous memoirs). As both her parents are deceased, her father as a result of a car accident when Dani was in her early twenties, and her mother in about 2001, Dani can’t ask them to explain.
Inheritance relates Dani’s journey as she pieces together fragments of information to determine why it is that her father is not her biological father, and who it may be. It’s a difficult process, both emotionally, as she struggles to come to terms with all of what she learns, and what it means to her, and practically, given so much time had passed.
I found Dani’s story to be compelling, her situation may not be unique, but her experience is intensely personal, and she is honest about its impact on her. I did find the lack of objectivity frustrating at times, though it’s not my place to judge her particular issues.
A thought provoking and emotional memoir, Inheritance is an interesting exploration of identity, and belonging.
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