Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

Dani Shapiro

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2019

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

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Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 42 Summary

Although Shapiro describes her meeting with Ben as miraculous, it does not answer pressing questions about her parents. She continues her research on artificial insemination, going so far as to peruse catalogs of sperm donors, most of whom are anonymous. She wonders if donors fully understand the impact of their actions. Years earlier, Shapiro and Michael considered using donor eggs to conceive a second child. Unlike Shapiro’s parents, however, they planned to tell their baby about her origins. Shapiro visits California Cryobank, the country’s largest sperm bank. Its elderly founder, Cappy Rothman, is distressed to learn that she identified her biological father. She asks Rothman if his organization encourages parents to disclose the truth to their children, stressing that finding out long after the fact can be traumatic. He concedes this point, before making a flippant remark about her physical appearance and good genes.

Chapter 43 Summary

Shapiro writes a note on her half-sister Emily’s Facebook page and receives an email reply the following day. Emily instantly feels familiar to Shapiro. They are about the same age, have been married a similar length of time, and have children who are also close in age. Both are strong, quiet, loyal, sensitive, serious about their work, and devoted mothers. Both were raised in religious households and now follow the same meditation teacher. Indeed, the sister have so much in common that Shapiro imagines they could have been friends had they accidentally crossed paths. Emily sends Shapiro their grandmother’s recipe for Twenty-Four-Hour Lettuce Salad. They share pictures of their families and homes. Their bond quickly grows.

Chapter 44 Summary

Shapiro was certain of many things throughout her life, only to learn that she was wrong. She makes Christmas cookies and lights Hanukkah candles during the holidays to embrace both parts of her identity. She and Ben continue to exchange messages, including poetry and quotes. As her relationship with Ben grows, Shapiro’s thoughts increasingly turn to her father Paul, who remains present as she navigates her new reality. She finds notes she took years earlier during a phone session with a medium. The woman relayed a message from her father: “He apologizes for not speaking the truth in your childhood. A lot left unsaid. He says someday you will understand why he needed to walk this path alone” (218).

Chapter 45 Summary

Shapiro attends a lecture by Luke Dittrich, the grandson of a doctor who performed lobotomies in the 1940s and 50s. What attracted her to the event was the talk’s subtitle: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets. Both Shapiro and Luke had to come to terms with family secrets decades after the fact. Fertility doctors in the mid-20th century told couples of the eugenic benefits of donor conception, arguing that their children would be the progeny of men of science with exemplary family histories. The truth was darker and more complex. Some doctors inseminated patients with their own sperm. Many did not place limits on the number of times a man might donate, resulting in clusters of half siblings in small geographic areas. Moreover, there were no mechanisms to verify the veracity of donors’ claims. Shapiro reaches out to Dr. Farris’s children repeatedly. None of them respond. She wonders if they are ashamed of their father’s actions.

Chapter 46 Summary

Shapiro describes coming to terms with the truth about her parents, namely, that they sought out Dr. Farris because he used donor sperm. She reaches this conclusion with the help of Michael, who reminds that when scientists encounter competing theories making the same prediction, the simplest one is generally better. The simplest explanation is that Shapiro’s parents knew she was the child of a sperm donor but chose not to tell her. This revelation shines new light on Paul’s depression and physical decline. It also provided fresh insights into Irene, who likely convinced Paul to go along with her wishes. Shapiro reflects on her given name, Daneile (pronounced Da-neel), a unique name that prompted people to ask if she was really Jewish and with which she never identified. She wonders why her mother chose this unusual name when the circumstances of her birth were already so exceptional.

Chapter 47 Summary

Shapiro revisits the topic of uncertainty. She accepts that she will never know the whole truth about her parents and the circumstances of her conception. Her rigid notion of her identity falls away, leaving her with a sense of openness and possibility. She recalls her mother declaring that Jacob looked like a Shapiro shortly after his birth. Shapiro does not believe her mother was lying. Rather, her mother clung to the unlikely narrative that her husband fathered her only child. This story contributed to her unhappiness and rage, which she took out on her family. Shapiro examines the contents of a box of papers in her basement. It contains objects from her childhood, including artwork depicting herself as a shapeless blob, her mother as a jagged-tooth monster, and her father as a stick figure on the margins. The box also contains a letter her mother wrote a few months before her death. The letter mentions a pink card she received on the occasion of Shapiro’s birth, which includes a handwritten note from Mrs. Farris. Shapiro’s mother ends her letter with a reference to this note, specifying that without Dr. Farris, Shapiro wouldn’t exist.

Chapter 48 Summary

Shapiro gets a shoulder tattoo of a swallow with two compasses around its beak. Swallows are migratory birds with internal compasses. They use the earth’s geomagnetic field, as well as light, stars, and other cues, to guide them. Shapiro used to be unaware of her own coordinates. She did not know who or what she was. The tattoo is a visual reminder of her newfound internalized compass. She goes to the Probate Court of the State of Connecticut to change her first name from Daneile to Dani. Her birth certificate would always say Daneile, daughter of Paul, but her legal name is now one with which she identifies.

Chapter 49 Summary

On a book tour, Shapiro imagines what her life might have looked like if her parents had told her the truth from the outset. She felt different growing up. Knowing that she was, in fact, different, might have given her comfort and brought her family closer. Shapiro meets Ben and Pilar for lunch in Portland. Ben and Pilar plan to attend Shapiro’s reading at Powell’s Books. Shapiro’s thoughts turn to her father, who died before she became a writer. She grieves for her father, who never experienced paternal pride in her professional successes. Pilar expresses concern that other donor-conceived people will discover that Ben is their biological father. She tells Shapiro she is welcome in their home, but asks her to protect their privacy if other donor children come forward. She also refers to Ben as Shapiro’s daddy, a term that seems grossly misplaced. Shapiro contemplates the ethics of protecting the Waldens’ privacy. She also wonders if she has other half-siblings and what it would feel like to hear from them. She is thankful to be the first to reach out to Ben and that both her fathers are honorable men.

Chapter 50 Summary

Family members occupy the entire fourth row at Shapiro’s reading at Powell’s Books, including Michael, Ben, Pilar, Emily, and her husband, Scott. She raises her arms as if bracketing the air during her talk, a gesture that Ben makes in his lectures. Feeling her father’s presence and absence at the bookstore, she silently calls to him using the Hebrew word, hineni—here I am.

Part 4, Chapters 42-50 Analysis

Part 4 revisits the themes of identity and family. In Chapter 44, for example, Shapiro discusses the rare eye disease she inherited from her biological father. She was unaware of Ben’s existence for over fifty years, yet he was present in her life from the outset: “I was not my father’s child. The eyes through which I saw the world from the moment they opened were eyes that I inherited from Ben Walden” (216). Despite not being Paul’s genetic child, however, Shapiro feels inextricably tied to him, as she has throughout her life:

I spent my entire adult life trying to make him proud. Not a day had passed since his death during which I didn’t think of him, or silently confer with him. My initial piercing sorrow at our lack of biological connection had begun to fade, as had the double sorrow as I came to believe he’d carried the truth in his heart […] I may have been cut from the same cloth as Ben Walden, but I was and forever would be Paul Shapiro’s daughter […] “I was connected to him on the level of neshama [breath], which had nothing to do with biology, and everything to do with love (219).

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Secrecy plays a central role in Part 4 of Shapiro’s memoir. In Chapter 42, she addresses the ethics of secrecy as it relates to fertility treatments. There are two distinct aspects to this secrecy. The first is the promise of anonymity many fertility clinics make to sperm and egg donors to widen the donor pool. The second is parents’ secrecy with their children. Like Paul and Irene, many infertile parents choose not to disclose that their children are the product of donor sperm or eggs. Shapiro has friends who conceived using donors. Some told their children the truth, while others chose not to disclose. The ethics of not disclosing weighed on Shapiro: “I felt uncomfortable around the kids who weren’t aware of their true identities. How was it possible that I knew something so fundamental about them that they didn’t know themselves? How could the parents believe this was for the best? I couldn’t imagine—so I told myself—going through life carrying such a secret” (200).

Her stance becomes firmer after she learns the truth about her parents. Secrecy is not just unethical, but potentially devastating: “The hidden disaster was secrecy, the pretense and magical thinking, the certainty that no one ever needed to know […] They had banished the truth even from themselves, thereby obscuring it from me” (200). Only after meeting Ben does Shapiro begin to see parallels between what her parents did and her own experience with assisted reproduction. Shapiro and Michael planned to tell their child the truth about her origins: “This baby—if there were to be a baby—would always know her origin. It would be woven into her earliest life like a bright thread, with no fanfare” (200). This approach is diametrically opposed to that of Shapiro’s parents, who took the truth about her origins to their grave: “They possessed only their own fear, shame, despair, and desire for a child at any cost. They joined hands and went deeper into the wilderness until the only way out was through. There was no going back. And then they pretended that it never happened. They never spoke of it again—not to each other, not to family, nor to friends” (223).

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The fertility industry encourages secrecy. This was true in the 20th century when the industry was still nascent, and it remains true today. Finegold’s 1964 book about artificial insemination enumerates the benefits of secrecy, not just for the donors and parents, but also for the doctors:

Some rely on the strict secrecy involved with A.I. to deter litigation. Many doctors refer their pregnant A.I. patients to an obstetrician who is not aware of the donor insemination. If the obstetrician knows that the husband is not the father of the newborn child, it is dishonest and illegal for him to claim the husband as the father on the birth certificate. […] A well-known and respected author on infertility insists that the ‘white lie’ is a kindly, humane act (223-24).

The director of California Cryobank, one of the largest sperm banks in the country, continues to promote secrecy. He is distressed when Shapiro informs him that she found her biological father. Like many other sperm bank directors, he believes doing away with anonymity is a disservice to donors, who participate on the condition of anonymity. Shapiro concedes this may be true. Her ethical problem thus becomes an existential dilemma: “If Ben had known, as a young medical student, that his identity might someday be found out, he would never have done it. I would not exist” (203).

Shapiro makes extensive use of literary references and quotes to elucidate her thoughts and feelings in Part 4. For example, in Chapter 42, she cites Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, a four-part novel based on the Old Testament story of Joseph:

“His desire to set a new beginning to the chain of events to which he belonged encountered the same difficulty that it always does: the fact that everybody has a father, that nothing comes first and of itself” (198). The plight of the Biblical Joseph helps Shapiro understand her complex origins. She and Ben come from two different worlds and lived separate lives, yet they shared a powerful bond: “He begat me—to use the ancient language—and therefore a connection existed between us so powerful it felt impossible to grasp” (198). In Chapter 47, Shapiro contemplates John Keats’s idea of negative capability, “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (229). According to Keats, uncertainty allows for freedom and self-knowledge. His ideas help Shapiro come to terms with the uncertainties that now dominate her life, which she hopes may lead to new possibilities: “By my being willing not to know thoroughly who I am and where I come from, the rigid structures surrounding my identity might begin to give way, leaving behind a sense of openness and possibility” (229).

Friends and relatives also use literary quotes in their exchanges with Shapiro. In Chapter 48, for instance, Rabbi David Wolpe, Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, recites the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to help Shapiro understand that her newfound knowledge about herself is multifaceted: “God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, / And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face, A gauntlet with a gift in it” (237). In an email to Shapiro, Emily cites the work of Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist teacher and writer she admires to express the thrill of having her life turned upside-down: “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land” (214). Emily’s acceptance of uncertainty helps Shapiro do the same. She comes to understand the complexity of her trauma, which is neither entirely good, nor entirely bad: “You can say, ‘This is impossible, terrible.’ Or you can say, ‘This is beautiful, wonderful.’ You can imagine that you’re in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home” (210).