I’m still a little stunned to have been interviewed by our CBS News Bay Area affiliate during Adoption Awareness Month.
Anchor Len Kiese asked thoughtful, probing questions about my new novel, adoption, Guatemala, family. Thanks for watching here!
My interview on CBS SF Bay Area Read More »
November is National Adoption Awareness Month and I’m honored to have my essay included in Chicago Now’s 10th annual “30 Adoption Portraits in 30 Days.” The title says it all– “Adoption is the Most Complicated Relationship I’ve Ever Been Involved In”–and I’ve been in a few complicated relationships. Thank you to Carrie Goldman for publishing this essay (and another in 2016) and for her 10 years of raising awareness of adoption with a series that includes all voices of the triad: person who is adopted, birth parent, and adoptive parent.
PS: The post includes a short excerpt from my novel, Mother Mother, that you’ll find at the end. Thanks for reading! 
#30 Portraits in 30 Days Read More »
Today I’m posting a review of another memoir I read recently, Missing Mothers, by Martha Birkett Bordwell. Martha is an adoptive mother from Minnesota who reached out to me to read her book, which I was honored and happy to do. I love that we mothers strive to express our truths. As I wrote to Martha, we learn from one another. Martha and her husband adopted their son and daughter from South Korea and Guatemala in the late 1970s, early 1980s, so she writes from the perspective of long experience. Below is the review I posted on Amazon with a link to order here. I recommend!
An intense, introspective meditation
Missing Mothers is an intense, introspective meditation on motherhood, infertility, transracial adoption, and family. Martha Bordwell’s mother died in childbirth when Bordwell was six years old, a tragedy that marked Bordwell for the rest of her life. Bordwell’s beloved, hardworking father of three remarried, and Bordwell’s relationship with her stepmother / second mother, Myra, was fraught from the beginning. In clean, crisp, and descriptive prose, Bordwell reveals her despair at not being able to hold a pregnancy, and her gradual acceptance of motherhood through adoption to a son from S. Korea and daughter from Guatemala.
As an adoptive mother myself, I empathized with challenges Bordwell faced while rearing two children from two different cultures with two different sets of needs, when international adoption was not as widespread as it later became—the late 1970s and early 1980s. Bordwell and her husband clearly love their children, and Bordwell traces the kids’ trajectory from babyhood to healthy adulthood in short chapters that are absorbing. The reader cheers for her son’s marriage to a young woman he meets in S. Korea and hopes for a bright future for Bordwell’s daughter.
The final scenes where Bordwell discovers a Love Bird pin cherished (but never used) by stepmother Myra and a silver thimble left behind by Bordwell’s mother are almost unbearably sad. But the book ends on an optimistic note, demonstrating how Bordwell’s early, hard loss enabled her to deeply empathize with her children’s losses while creating her own unique family.
I recommend Missing Mothers to readers interested or involved in adoption, and to anyone looking for an engrossing, heartfelt memoir.
Missing Mothers is available on Indie Bound, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.
Missing Mothers by Martha Birkett Bordwell Read More »
For the past few days, I’ve been reading other people’s work–manuscripts, books–which feels like the right thing to do after focusing so long on only one piece of writing, my own. Elaine Pinkerton reached out to me from New Mexico, asking if I’d read her memoir, The Goodbye Baby: Adoptee Diaries, published in 2012. The answer of course was yes, the answer is always yes. I love reading other people’s memoirs or stories about adoption, infinitely more than I like writing my own.
What’s most fascinating about Elaine’s memoir is that it’s drawn from journals she kept for 52 years. (Yes. 52!) After her second husband and her adoptive parents died, she pulled down diaries started in 1956 and re-read them, hoping to find wisdom within, or insights into herself, revelations. Upon finishing The Goodbye Baby, I’d say she did. Elaine’s memoir caused me to think about my own journals which I’ve also kept since childhood. The forced quarantine of Covid seems a good time to burrow through the past to discover who I once was. I’ve resisted this task for years and I’m not sure why. But Elaine’s book inspired me.
Here’s the review for The Goodbye Baby I posted on Amazon. Click here to order. The memoir is a fascinating read. I recommend!
An Examined Life
I wasn’t prepared for the candor of Elaine Pinkerton’s The Goodbye Baby. The word that comes to mind is “scalding,” as in scorching, searing. Hers is the definition of the examined life, from the first entries in 1956 recounting Girl Scouts, chewing gum, and a polio shot to her final entries in 2009, where she at last accepts and feels compassion for herself, a compassion the reader has felt all along.
Pinkerton’s entries reveal the effects of being relinquished at age 5 by a mother who couldn’t take care of her and express the pressures to conform to society’s expectations to marry post-college and be the perfect wife and mother. Throughout her life, Pinkerton is a seeker, trying on different identities, relationships, lifestyles, and spiritual practices.
The Goodbye Baby is an intriguing collage penned by a complex, self-aware woman struggling to find inner peace and fulfill her destiny as the artist she was born to be. A compelling read.
The Goodbye Baby: Adoptee Diaries by Elaine Pinkerton Read More »
I realize that I never posted the link to my interview with Franklin Escobedo, librarian at the Larkspur Library. Franklin asked wonderful questions and seemed to really like the book. I’m so grateful to him and the Larkspur Library for hosting local authors. A wonderful experience all around.
You can watch the interview here.
Interview at Larkspur Library Read More »
