Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

Part 3 returns to the themes of identity and family. In Chapter 31, for example, Shapiro comes to a new understanding of both the bond and the distance that existed between her and Paul: “My father and I had shared a history, a culture, a landscape, a home, a language, an entire world. Our bond was real and unbreakable. But I also now knew, in the starkest terms, what had been missing: mutual recognition. I did not come from him. I had never once looked into his face and seen my own” (143). Similarly, in Chapter 40, she describes seeing herself in Ben the instant she met him:

It was bewildering to look at him—to see my features reflected back at me. All those staring contests I’d held with myself as a child were about this, I now understood. I had been searching and searching for the truth in the mirror, trying to make sense of my own face. Here it was, finally, irrefutably, in the form of the old man standing before me (186).

Shapiro also searches for the familiar when she sees a picture of Ben’s parents in front of their farmhouse in Ohio. Her grandfather is a mustached man in shirtsleeves, while her grandmother dons a casual flowered dress. In other words, they look nothing like Paul’s parents: an imposing bald man with a yarmulke and a regal women with a broach at her throat. Shapiro tries to come to terms with her dual identity as she gazes at the photograph: “[Paul’s parents] were the grandparents of my psyche but not of my being. I was descended from this couple” (191). The moment is a poignant one for Shapiro. She stares at the picture in silence while Jewish families walked to shul to remember their dead.

Secrecy and anonymity play a central role in Part 3, as they did in previous sections. When Ben cuts off ties with Shapiro in Chapter 32, for example, he cites the promise of anonymity as a key factor in becoming a sperm donor: “When I donated sperm as a twenty-two-year-old medical student, I was promised privacy and anonymity by the fertility institute […] The thought of some future contacts from the children conceived by artificial insemination never crossed my mind” (147). The secrecy surrounding sperm donation had a profound impact on Shapiro.

In Chapter 32, she receives a photograph of herself dancing at a 16th birthday party. She recalls being a confused teenager who aimed to please and lacked a clear sense of who she was. Although many teenagers struggle with their identity, Shapiro’s sense of self was shakier than most. The truth about her conception cast a new light on her adolescence: “That girl did not know who her father was. She was wrapped in a thick cocoon of the deepest sort of misinformation. She, quite literally, did not know where she came from. Would I ever again look at a photograph of myself, or my father, or my mother, without the eerie sense that our lives together had, from the start, been built on a lie?” (152).

Indeed, Shapiro’s parents were so traumatized by their fertility problems that they lied about it to everyone in their lives, including their only daughter. Thus, their secret became hers: “My parents’ tortured pact of secrecy was as much a part of me as the genes that had been passed down by my mother and Ben Walden. It was another facet of the whole picture” (164). Shapiro revisits the issue of secrets in Chapter 35, describing how her parents’ secrecy shaped who she was: “The discovery that I wasn’t who I had believed myself to be all my life, that my parents had […] made the choice to keep the truth of my identity from me—this was no singular incident. It wasn’t something outside myself, to be held to the light and examined, and finally understood. It was inseparable from myself. It was myself” (164).

In Part 3, Shapiro continues to bring her experiences and thoughts to life with vivid imagery. Chapter 32 describes Ben cutting off contact as a slammed door, and Shapiro’s reliance on alcohol as a means of “blunting the internal blow” (150). In Chapter 34, Shapiro compares her first contact with Emily on social media to one of the oldest forms of long-distance communication–the smoke signal: “I touched follow on my phone’s screen. I saw it—a vision—two half-sisters who had never known of one another’s existence, sending the most modern version of a smoke signal, each from her own coast” (162). In Chapter 35, Shapiro uses the analogy of vision to explain how her life changed after learning the truth about her parents: “It felt as if I had only ever been able to see in two dimensions, and now I had been handed a pair of 3-D glasses. The clarity was both liberating and devastating” (164). In the same chapter, she describes herself as the enigmatic black box rescuers use to piece together the events leading to a plane crash: “I am the black box, discovered years—many years—after the crash […] I have spent my life transmitting the faintest signal. Over here! Over here!” (165). She then compares herself to the rescuer tasked with retrieving the box: “I am also the diver who has discovered the black box. What’s this? I had been looking for it all my life without knowing it existed. Now I hold it in my hands. It may or may not contain clues. It is a witness to a history it recorded but did not see What went on in that plane? Why did it fall from the sky?” (165). Chapter 38 touches on Shapiro’s willful blindness to the truth–she did not look like her relatives and her mother told her she underwent fertility treatments. The signs “screamed in neon” (176), yet Shapiro chose not to see them.

In Chapter 39, Shapiro uses an apt metaphor to explain both her state of mind and the persistent pain in her shoulder: “My shoulder had begun to ache over the summer, and by early autumn I could hardly move it […] If the body can be seen as a metaphor, then it seemed I was shouldering something, carrying a giant boulder on my back all through the night in my sleep, then awakening to a half-frozen self” (180). She follows this with an evocative description of the power of the unconscious mind: “What had I known without knowing? My unconscious mind had shaped stories out of its own rough landscape. I had scrambled from one rocky path to the next. I had spent all my life writing my way through darkness like a miner in a cave until I spit into a plastic vial and the lights blinked on” (181). This passage not only captures how Shapiro made sense of her life before her DNA test, but also gestures to her chosen profession.

Part 3 draws on excerpts from literary works to elucidate Shapiro’s thoughts and feelings. In Chapter 32, for example, she cites a passage from Delmore Schwartz’s ‘In Dreams Become Responsibilities’ in an imaginary message to Ben: “You will find that out soon enough, everything you do matters too much” (153). She uses this quote after Ben announces he is cutting off contact. It serves as a reminded of the responsibility he has toward her, and to all the biological children he may have fathered. Ben donated sperm as a medical student without giving his actions a second thought. Shapiro is a living reminder that his actions were, in fact, consequential. In Chapter 35, Shapiro cites Bessel van der Kolk, an American psychiatrist whose research focuses on post-traumatic stress: “The nature of trauma […] is that you have no recollection of it as a story. The nature of traumatic experience is that the brain doesn’t allow a story to be created” (165). Van der Kolk’s words are particularly resonant for Shapiro because she writes for a living. She is a storyteller who moved from fiction to memoir. She devoted herself to capturing her life and her family’s life with words. Writing is how Shapiro makes sense of her feelings and experiences. The trauma of learning that her life was built on a lie not only shatters the story of her life but also prevents her from writing it anew.