Book for August: Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro
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.
The book is available for purchase locally at Chaucer's Books or Amazon.
We will convene on Wednesday, August 19 at 3:00 pm on Zoom to discuss the book. Link and password will be provided to those who request to join. Let’s get reading!
Please contact Ruby Vargeson at rvargeson@sbjf.org to sign up.