Inheritance

First published 2019

“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 made last year about her father, and her struggle to piece together the hidden the story of her own life”—“In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA, Dani Shapiro received the astonishing news that her beloved deceased father was not her biological father. Over the course of a single day, her entire history—the life she had lived—crumbled beneath her.

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In just a few hours of Internet sleuthing, she was able to piece together the story of her conception and, remarkably, find a YouTube video of her biological father—his face and mannerisms eerily similar to her own. [This] 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 had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years.”…