This month, we will use our community dinner time to discuss Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love, written by Dani Shapiro. Bring your own snack or dinner and chat about the book with others in our community. If you are unable to read the full book beforehand, please feel free to join in on the reflection and conversation!

Please RSVP to caitlin@encompassadoptees.org.

About the Book:

What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?

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.

Inheritance is a book about secrets–secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman’s urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in–a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. — https://danishapiro.com/books/inheritance/

NOTE: Encompass Adoptees encourages critical thinking and reflection on the content we utilize in our groups. Book discussions or reading lists do not imply agreement with all portions of a book, nor do they indicate endorsement of the author/s, their programs, techniques, etc.