It is after she discovers who her real father is, or at least the sperm donor, that the narrative deepens and enriches our deeper understanding of paternity, genetics, and what were then called “test tube tots.” Sperm donors had been guaranteed anonymity, and the man she contacted was initially resistant to upset the balance of his family dynamic because of his participation in the procedure decades earlier. But who? The first half of the book trudges through a bit too much day-by-day detail, as the author becomes convinced that there’s no way these results could have been mistaken.
Through DNA testing to which she had only submitted because her husband had done so, Shapiro discovered that she shares none of hers with her father’s side of the family and that the sperm that impregnated her mother had come from someone else. I had somehow convinced myself that I was only my father’s daughter.” Eventually, she learned that she wasn’t her father’s daughter at all, at least not in the way that she had initially understood. “My single best defense had always been that I was my father’s daughter,” she writes. The author’s relationship with her mother was difficult.
In her latest, she delves into an origin story that puts everything she previously believed and wrote about herself in fresh perspective. Before focusing on memoirs, Shapiro ( Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage, 2017, etc.) drew from her family life in her fiction.
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