dani shapiro inheritance a memoir of genealogy paternity and love

She always felt out of place in her birth family, as if on some level she knew she didn’t belong. Her parents’ relationship was fraught her mother suffered from borderline personality disorder, and her father was depressive. In many ways, the knowledge comes as a relief. At any rate, the true drama of “Inheritance” is not Shapiro’s discovery of her father’s identity but the meaning she makes of it. A Twitter acquaintance who calls herself a “genealogy geek” needs only a family tree on showing a first cousin previously unknown to Shapiro and a few web searches to locate the man who turns out to be Shapiro’s biological father - a decidedly non-Jewish doctor in Oregon who went to medical school at Penn.Īll this takes place within the first third of the book, so I’m not giving much away. Now she learns that in those days, many sperm donors were medical students. Shapiro had heard rumors that such clinics used to “mix sperm” - that is, the semen of men with low sperm count would be combined with donor sperm to increase the chances of pregnancy - but she didn’t give it more thought. When the time was right, Shapiro’s mother had told her, her father would rush down from New York, where he worked on the stock exchange, and provide sperm for artificial insemination. The clinic was run by Edmond Farris, a doctor who had developed a new method for pinpointing when a woman ovulated. Shapiro had long known that she was conceived in Philadelphia, at a clinic for couples with fertility problems: “Not a pretty story,” in her mother’s words.

Dani shapiro inheritance a memoir of genealogy paternity and love