Inheritance

 

I borrowed Dani Shapiro's memoir, Inheritance, from the library on a whim after seeing it recommended on Facebook -- I'm a sucker for stories about family mysteries and secrets and long lost relatives. In fact I've recently also become addicted to the British TV show, Long Lost Family, which has eight seasons available on ABC iView, and has reduced my own family to tears every time we've watched it.

Inheritance is Dani Shapiro's own story of accidentally discovering, through an impulsive DNA test, that she was in fact not related to her own deceased father, nor, by extension, to her much older half-sister, or her large extended family on her father's side. This was a devastating blow; Shapiro had always felt closer to her father than her mother -- who was she, if she was not her father's child? Inheritance tells how she unravelled the mystery of her paternity and gradually came to terms with her experience of her identity shattering. 

The discovery was all the more shocking because Shapiro identifies strongly as Jewish; while she was still Jewish, because Jewishness is traced through the mother, the loss of her whole father's family rocked her sense of self. But paradoxically, the uncovering of the secret also made sense of the silence at the heart of her parents' marriage; of her mother's ambivalent love; of her father's hollowness; and of a persistent uncertainty in Shapiro's own consciousness.

Inheritance is a fascinating story, though it might have been more satisfying as a long magazine article than spun out into a whole book.