National Adoption Month

A Memoir

by Chung, Nicole

Book - 2018

Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. She was told...Show more Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. She was told her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But Nicole grew up facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn't see, and wondered if the story she'd been told was the whole truth. Here Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, and chronicles the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets. Show less

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Family Family

by Frankel, Laurie

Book - 2024

India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actress. Armed with a stack of index cards and a hell of a lot of talent, she goes from awkward 16-year-old to Broa...Show more India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actress. Armed with a stack of index cards and a hell of a lot of talent, she goes from awkward 16-year-old to Broadway ingenue to tv star. But while promoting her most recent project, a film about adoption, India does what you should never do--she tells a journalist the truth: it's a bad movie. Like so many movies about adoption, it tells only one story, a tragic one. But India's an adoptive mom herself and knows there's so much more to her family than tragedy. Soon she's at the center of a media storm, battling accusations from the press and the paparazzi, from protesters on the right and advocates on the left. Her daughter Fig knows they need help--and who better to call for help than family? Because India's not just an adoptive mom. She also had a baby she gave up for adoption her senior year of high school. That baby is now sixteen, excited to meet her birth mother and eager to help, but she also has an agenda and secrets of her own. It turns out what makes a family isn't blood and it isn't love because no matter how they're formed, the hallmark of true family is this: it's complicated Show less

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I Would Meet You Anywhere

A Memoir

by Ito, Susan

Book - 2023

A memoir about one woman's search for her birth parents, exploring complicated relationships with family, the legacy of WWII internment on generations of Japanese Americans, and the challenges adoptees often face in learning their own histories A memoir about one woman's search for her birth parents, exploring complicated relationships with family, the legacy of WWII internment on generations of Japanese Americans, and the challenges adoptees often face in learning their own histories Show less

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A Living Remedy

by Chung, Nicole

Book - 2023

From the bestselling author of ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW comes a searing memoir of class, inequality, and grief-a daughter's search to understand the lives he...Show more From the bestselling author of ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW comes a searing memoir of class, inequality, and grief-a daughter's search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she's lost. In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you'd hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them. When Nicole Chung graduated from high school, she couldn't hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found a sense of community she had always craved as an Asian American adoptee - and a path to the life she'd long wanted. But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in - where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations - looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets. When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of financial instability and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his premature death. And then the unthinkable happens - less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as Covid descends upon the world. Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another - and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and tragic inequalities in American society Show less

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Matched

A Memoir

by Massar, Denise

Book - 2024

When their adoption attorney told Denise and her husband that they would be responsible for finding a woman willing to give them her baby, Denise was horr...Show more When their adoption attorney told Denise and her husband that they would be responsible for finding a woman willing to give them her baby, Denise was horrified. But horror quickly turned into an obsession. She advertised across the country, fielding and vetting potential birth moms by phone. The first to contact Denise had been raped, twice. Ashamed and depressed, she spent her pregnancy doing coke and drinking vodka to knock herself out. Do you want to adopt my baby? she asked. The director of a women's shelter housing victims of human trafficking asked Denise, Would you have a problem adopting a baby born of prostitution? Denise knew she wouldn't, but what would her husband say? The eight birth moms Denise met during her search - one an unhoused twenty-year-old, another an MBA-holding executive - changed her life forever, leading her not only to her child, but, in a twist of fate, to the one woman Denise thought she'd never meet: Her own birth mom. Matched is first and foremost a book for memoir lovers. It's also a love letter to anyone touched by adoption. Whatever your place in the triad: adoptee, birth parent, or adoptive parent, your story is told within these pages. Adoption is beautiful. It's also problematic. Massar invites you to ride shotgun on her un-instagrammable journey. Because real is so much better than perfect. Show less

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Motherhood So White

A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America

by Austin, Nefertiti

Book - 2019

In America, Mother = White. That's what Nefertiti, a single African American woman, discovered when she decided she wanted to adopt a Black baby boy out o...Show more In America, Mother = White. That's what Nefertiti, a single African American woman, discovered when she decided she wanted to adopt a Black baby boy out of the foster care system. Eager to finally join the motherhood ranks, Nefertiti was shocked when people started asking her why she wanted to adopt a 'crack baby' or said that she would never be able to raise a Black son on her own. She realized that American society saw motherhood through a white lens, and that there would be no easy understanding or acceptance of the kind of family she hoped to build. Motherhood So White is the story of Nefertiti's fight to create the family she always knew she was meant to have and the story of motherhood that all American families need now. In this unflinching account of her parenting journey, Nefertiti examines the history of adoption in the African American community, faces off against stereotypes of single, Black motherhood, and confronts the reality of raising children of color in racially charged, modern-day America. Honest, vulnerable, and uplifting, Motherhood So White reveals what Nefertiti knew all along - that the only requirement for a successful family is one raised with love. Show less

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The Myth of Surrender

by McNees, Kelly O'Connor

Book - 2022

What if the most important decision of your life was not yours to make? This vivid and powerful novel follows two women whose paths intersect at a materni...Show more What if the most important decision of your life was not yours to make? This vivid and powerful novel follows two women whose paths intersect at a maternity home in the "Baby Scoop Era." In 1960, free-spirited Doreen is a recent high-school grad and waitress in a Chicago diner. She doesn't know Margie, sixteen and bookish, who lives a sheltered suburban life, but they soon meet when unplanned pregnancies send them to the Holy Family Home for the Wayward in rural Illinois. Assigned as roommates because their due dates line up, Margie and Doreen navigate Holy Family's culture of secrecy and shame and become fast friends as the weight of their coming decision -- to keep or surrender their babies -- becomes clear. Except, they soon realize, the decision has already been made for them. Holy Family, like many of the maternity homes where 1.5 million women "relinquished" their babies in what is now known as the Baby Scoop Era, is not interested in what the birth mothers want. In its zeal to make the babies "legitimate" in closed adoptions, Holy Family manipulates and bullies birth mothers, often coercing them to sign away their parental rights while still under the effects of anesthesia. What happens next, as their babies are born and they leave Holy Family behind, will force each woman to confront the depths and limits of motherhood and friendship, and fight to reclaim control over their own lives. Written by the acclaimed author of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott and Undiscovered Country, The Myth of Surrender explores a hidden chapter of American history that still reverberates across the lives of millions of women and their children. Show less

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The Nature of Small Birds

by Finkbeiner, Susie

Book - 2021

When Mindy announces that she is returning to Vietnam to find her birthmother, it inspires her father, mother, and sister to recall the events of her adop...Show more When Mindy announces that she is returning to Vietnam to find her birthmother, it inspires her father, mother, and sister to recall the events of her adoption at the end of the Vietnam War during Operation Baby Lift. In this beautiful time-slip story, Mindy's family reexamines what it means to grow together beyond genetic code Show less

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Other People's Children

by Hoffmann, R. J.

Book - 2021

Gail and Jon Durbin moved to the Chicago suburbs to set up house as soon as Gail got pregnant. But then she miscarried - once, twice, three times. Determi...Show more Gail and Jon Durbin moved to the Chicago suburbs to set up house as soon as Gail got pregnant. But then she miscarried - once, twice, three times. Determined to expand their family, the Durbins turn to adoption. When several adoptions fall through, Gail's desire for a child overwhelms her. Carli is a pregnant teenager from a blue-collar town nearby, with dreams of going to college and getting out of her mother's home. When she makes the gut-wrenching decision to give her baby up for adoption, she chooses the Durbins. But Carli's mother, Marla, has other plans for her grandbaby. Show less

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Relinquished

The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood

by Sisson, Gretchen

Book - 2024

A powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, revealing the grief of the American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real. Adop...Show more A powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, revealing the grief of the American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real. Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable. The stories of relinquishing mothers are stories about our country's refusal to care for families at the most basic level, and to instead embrace an individual, private solution to a large-scale, social problem. With the recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization revoking abortion protections and the upcoming decision in Brackeen v. Haaland likely to revoke the Indian Child Welfare Act, we are in a political moment in which adoption is, increasingly, being revealed as an institution devoted to separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family-building. Rooted in a long-term study, Relinquished is an analysis of hundreds of in-depth interviews with American mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption. The voices of these women are powerful and heartrending; they deserve to be heard as a response to this moment Show less

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Surviving the White Gaze

A Memoir

by Carroll, Rebecca

Book - 2021

A stirring and powerful memoir from black cultural critic Rebecca Carroll recounting her struggle to overcome a completely white childhood in order to forge her identity as a black woman in America A stirring and powerful memoir from black cultural critic Rebecca Carroll recounting her struggle to overcome a completely white childhood in order to forge her identity as a black woman in America Show less

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When We Become Ours

A YA Adoptee Anthology

Book - 2023

There is no universal adoption experience, and no two adoptees have the same story. This anthology for teens edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung con...Show more There is no universal adoption experience, and no two adoptees have the same story. This anthology for teens edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung contains a wide range of powerful, poignant, and evocative stories in a variety of genres. These tales from fifteen bestselling, acclaimed, and emerging adoptee authors vividly and authentically reflect the complexity, breadth, and depth of adoptee experiences. This groundbreaking collection centers on what it's like growing up as an adoptee. These are stories by adoptees---for adoptees--reclaiming their own narratives. Show less

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"You Should Be Grateful"

Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption

by Tucker, Angela

Book - 2022

Tucker centers the experiences of adoptees to share deeply personal stories, well-researched history, and engrossing anecdotes from mentorship sessions wi...Show more Tucker centers the experiences of adoptees to share deeply personal stories, well-researched history, and engrossing anecdotes from mentorship sessions with adopted youth. These perspectives challenge the fairy-tale narrative of adoption, giving way to a fuller story that explores the impacts of racism, classism, family, love, and belonging Show less

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