dani shapiro inheritance a memoir of genealogy paternity and love

In the light of new knowledge, she begins to recall cryptic conversations with her mother that hinted at her origins. Thanks to information on Ancestry's website and her husband's research skills, she is watching a YouTube video of a stranger with her features, her coloring, her gestures only 36 hours after that mind-blowing email arrived. Shapiro writes vividly about her immediate sense of shock and dislocation, and she also recounts the head-spinning speed with which she tracks down her biological father. It's a cautionary tale about a brave new world of technology that erases privacy, and a story about one of the oldest themes of human narrative: finding oneself. What happened after that discovery is the compelling story Shapiro tells in her fifth memoir, Inheritance. 'By the time I went to bed that night,' she writes, 'my entire history - the life I had lived - had crumbled beneath me, like the buried ruins of an ancient forgotten city.' The man Shapiro thought was her father was not.

The half sister had done a DNA test, too, and when the two sent their results in for comparison, the numbers changed everything: They were 'no kind of sisters,' as Shapiro's husband said upon reading the email. Shapiro was an only child whose parents had both died, but she had an older half sister from her father's first marriage, whom she had never much gotten along with. Given what she knew about her parents' backgrounds, the Ashkenazi percentage should have been much higher, but she shrugged it off. Her results were puzzling: 52 percent Ashkenazi Jewish from Eastern Europe, the rest a mix of French, Irish, English and German.

Dani shapiro inheritance a memoir of genealogy paternity and love