Review: 'Adoption Memoirs' and the illusion of happily ever after
Joshua M. Patton / InReview
As a war veteran, I loathe the manipulative, viral videos of soldiers returning home to surprise their parents or children. Families are reunited in a joyous moment — the initial sorrow of separation forgotten. But it’s the soldiers struggling after redeployment most hurt by these false narratives. Coming home after war is rarely so easy.
The videos suggest that the moment of reunion “makes everything better,“ a falsehood that can ultimately hurt everyone involved. The same is true for stories of adoptees reuniting with their birth parents; these glimpses perpetuate the beautiful lie of reunification — something Marianne Novy explores with unflinching profundity in her latest, ”Adoption Memoirs: Inside Stories.”
I was surprised to realize this book was not itself a memoir of adoption, but rather a study of a number of memoirs from adoptive parents and children of adoption. It shouldn’t have been a shock, since Novy is a University of Pittsburgh Professor Emerita whose work on adoption and its untold, darker sides has been a significant part of her career.
Yet, “Adoption Memoirs” is not some dry, academic work. Novy’s voice rings out in the text through her passion for the subject and her own history. Like any good teacher, the work gives readers a full view of adoption — and leaves any judgment up to them.
Just like those videos of returning soldiers, often the “picture of adoption or reunion [with birth parents are presented] as a happy ending,” Novy writes. The memoirs examined in this work reveal the difficulty and trauma unique to adoptive families but, almost contradictorily, neither greater nor less than those found in more traditionally structured ones.
However, while most people understand the struggles around a family one is born into, adoption can be viewed as an inherently “better” situation. This book disabuses us of that notion, unveiling issues that those without firsthand experience might never consider.
“My new parents didn’t have much or any counseling — it was 1945,” Novy notes. “They presented it positively — they had chosen me, and they would be able to take better care of me ... But they didn’t know not to tell me I shouldn’t talk about adoption because other people wouldn’t understand.”
Novy’s work stresses how each person’s story is different, yet through its study of multiple works finds points of convergence. Whether a reader has a personal connection to adoption or not, they can walk away from the work understanding no one is truly alone. The experiences, joys and struggles the subjects faced can constitute the tropes of a subgenre, even if individual struggles feel unique.
“Adoption Memoirs” is also a book about America. Specifically, the way in which adoption is the rare political issue on which there is bipartisan consensus around its inherent goodness. The Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade is mentioned a number of times, because the anti-abortion movement points to adoption as the solution. The book questions this argument through the overwhelming sense of loss with which birth parents and adoptive children live.
To be clear, “Adoption Memoirs” doesn’t delve into the issue of “choice” so much as it lays bare how America’s political infrastructure fails all families. The lack of support provided to parents and children exacerbates the issues around adoption, and these are the issues, as Novy points out through the cited works, no one seems willing to even consider let alone discuss.
This book is an important work that treads new ground. It shows that “happy endings” are something for fiction. Real life is much more complicated, and only by facing uncomfortable truths can anything be done about it. And that’s much easier than hitting “play” on a sentimental reunification video.
Joshua M. Patton is a father, veteran and senior writer for Comic Book Resources, and his latest short story collection “Tales of Adventure & Fantasy: Giant-Sized!” is available online.