Biography Adoption

A raw, often wry, memoir of mothers, mysteries, and miracles. Surrendered at birth in a closed adoption, Candi Byrne’s biology and ethnicity is a secret. The impending arrival of her first grandchild ignites an urgency to identify potential genetic time bombs and confirm her ancestry. Due to arcane privacy laws, Candi is repeatedly denied access to the one person who could provide that information—her biological mother.

The mixed population is the fastest-growing group in the UK today, but the mainstream conversation around mixedness is stilted, repetitive and often problematic. At a time when ethnically ambiguous models fill our Instagram feeds and our high street shop windows, and when children of interracial relationships are lauded as heralding in the dawn of a post-racial utopia, journalist Natalie Morris takes a deep dive into what it really means to be mixed in Britain today.

When Andrew Bridge was seven years old, he and his mother - a mentally unstable woman who loved her child more than she could care for him - slid deeper and deeper into poverty, until they were reduced to scavenging for food in trash bins. Welfare officials did little more than threaten to take Andrew away, until a social worker arrived with a police escort and did just that while his mother screamed on the sidewalk.

In this unflinching, unforgettable memoir, Regina Louise tells the true story of overcoming neglect in the US foster-care system. Drawing on her experience as one of society’s abandoned children, she tells how she emerged from the cruel, unjust system, not only to survive, but to flourish. After years of jumping from one fleeting, often abusive home to the next, Louise meets a counselor named Jeanne Kerr. For the first time in her young life, Louise knows what it means to be seen, wanted, understood, and loved.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, young pregnant women entered the front door of a clinic in a small North Georgia town. Sometimes their babies exited out the back, sold to Northern couples who were desperate to hold a newborn in their arms. But these weren't adoptions - they were transactions. And one unethical doctor was exploiting other people's tragedies. Jane Blasio was one of those babies.

Experienced foster carer Rosie Lewis is used to looking after children from difficult home situations, but she finds herself struggling when she agrees to take in Taylor and her younger brother, Reece, for a short while. Taylor tries desperately not to fit in, to be the tough young teen that she has had to become, making it clear that she cares about nothing and no one, while Reece is just desperate for someone to love him.

These are the faces that call me "mom", the three children who made me a mother. When I started my journey into parenthood I never thought it would look like this. I never planned on having three adopted children, and I certainly never imagined that two of them would have Down syndrome. But like most of the things God does, once we stepped into the craziness and confusion of the unknown and unplanned, we quickly realized that we were indeed among the lucky few.

In the much-anticipated follow-up to Sunday Times best seller Trapped, foster carer Rosie Lewis tells the heartbreaking true story of Zadie. When the young teenage girl, thrown out of her home by her strict Muslim family, is discovered hiding on the city streets by the police, it is clear that all is not as it should be. Taught to believe that Westerners should not be trusted, when Zadie is initially delivered into the experienced hands of foster carer Rosie, she is understandably suspicious of the family around her.

In 1970, Lynda was 18, unmarried and pregnant when she was forced to give her baby up for adoption. She was sent by a doctor to a Catholic girls’ home for unmarried mothers, and told she’d have no hope of keeping her child because she was Aboriginal. After 26 years, Lynda was finally able to make contact with her lost son – but the much wished for reunion didn’t go well. When she looked into the adoption records, she found a web of lies – lies about her family, the baby’s father, her ‘consent’ for the adoption – and her Indigenous heritage had been completely erased.

In the tradition of The Promise of a Pencil and Kisses from Katie comes an inspirational memoir by the founder of Comfort Cases about his turbulent childhood in the foster care system and the countless obstacles and discrimination he endured in adopting his four children.

Some families are created in different ways but are still, in every way, a family. Writer and star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding Nia Vardalos firmly believed she was supposed to be a mom, but Mother Nature and modern medicine had put her in a headlock. So she made a choice that shocked friends, family, and even herself: with only 14 hours' notice, she adopted a preschooler.

Jack Rocco was a baby when he was adopted by a blue-collar, Italian American family. Today a successful orthopedic surgeon, Jack’s identity was built around his Italian heritage, and while he knew the story of his “Gotday,” he didn’t know the story of his birth day. His was a closed adoption, and he only knew that his birth parents were a young couple—an Italian father and a German Irish mother—who couldn’t afford a child.

Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood.

The acclaimed writer A. M. Homes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with a family of his own. The Mistress's Daughter is the ruthlessly honest account of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her.

That’s the real life story of country music star Jimmy Wayne. It’s a miracle that Jimmy survived being hungry and homeless, bouncing in and out of the foster care system, and sleeping in the streets. But he didn’t just overcome great adversity in his life; he now uses his country music platform to help children everywhere, especially teenagers in foster care who are about to age out of the system. Walk to Beautiful is the powerfully emotive account of Jimmy’s horrendous childhood and the love shown him by Russell and Bea Costner, the elderly couple who gave him a stable home and provided the chance to complete his education. Jimmy says of Bea, “She changed every cell in my body.”

Sally grew up in a dilapidated house by the sea where men were forbidden, her childhood world filled with mystery and intrigue. Hippies trailed through the kitchen looking for God - their leader was Aunt Di, who ruled the house with charismatic force. When Sally’s baby brother vanished from his pram, she became suspicious of the activities going on around her. What happened to Baby David and the woman called Poor Sue? And where did all the people singing and wailing prayers in the front room suddenly go?

Raised in a loving adoptive home, at age 21 Claire Culwell decided to meet her birth mother. That's when she got the shock of her life. Claire's mother, Tonya, confessed that when she was pregnant with Claire, she'd gone to a clinic for an abortion, but afterward her belly had continued to grow. What both Tonya and her doctor had missed was that she'd actually been pregnant with twins. The abortion that terminated the life of Claire's twin had miraculously spared Claire.

This powerful and haunting memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next 14 years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years - a book in the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club.

Magnanimous and charming, Bob Guterl knew that he could solve the racial problems bedeviling postwar America. Determined to stave off impending global catastrophe, the larger-than-life judge and his resolute wife, Sheryl, launched a radical experiment, raising their two biological sons alongside four children adopted from Korea, Vietnam, and the South Bronx―the so-called “war zones of the American century”―in a white clapboard house with a white picket fence in small-town New Jersey.

Whack.... At three in the morning Gina was sound asleep, yet somehow she was smacked in the head. She looked over at her husband, thinking perhaps he accidentally rolled over and flopped his arm on top of her, but he was sleeping soundly and facing the opposite direction. She turned to the other side and glaring back at her was her eight-year-old child.