Adoption Uncovered

We Don’t Know Enough About the Adoptee and First Parent Experience. Memoirs Can Help.

Photo by RDNE Stock project

The Time Before Research

It wasn’t a very long time ago when many adoptions were hidden away and not spoken of in polite company. Some young women still tell us stories of when their families sent them away to have a baby, then the baby was taken from them with little fanfare and given to strangers. (1) Back at that time, the main feelings people were concerned with were embarrassment and propriety. People were concerned with the reputations of their daughters and not as much with the attachment women may have to the baby they gave birth to or the depression that may follow the rupture of that relationship in their lives. (2)The future emotions of the baby hidden away were not on anyone’s radar either. (3)The baby should have found shelter in the bedroom they were allotted in the house of parents who had the money to raise them. That should have been sufficient. That was the end of the story. 

What We Are Starting to Learn

In more recent times, social scientists have begun to study how adoption can affect everyone touched by it in the long and short term. (4) We are starting to see smaller studies all the way up to comprehensive studies with many participants. (5) Even though we are learning more about adoption and the effects it can have on those who have been touched by it, research about the reality of it is still in its infancy. Some of the findings need more context, like when we say adoptees have more mental health issues. That finding in and of itself is not as useful as understanding why that might be. (6) It is hard to take action on small pieces of information that are not sewn together in a bigger picture of context. 

What Memoirs Used To Be

In the meantime, as science is starting to catch up, some of the anecdotal stories that are making their way through the mist in memoirs can help to fill in a bit of the gap. Memoirs years ago were most likely to contain the happy stories of adoptive families finding children to add to their home. They focused on the state of the parents before they met the child or children who entered their family. (7) Sometimes we learned about infertility and treatments, or fortuitous events that allowed them to travel to a foreign country to meet their child in an institution. Adoption was portrayed as a joyful joining of a child that was meant to inhabit a place they weren’t born into. (8) We know now it was never that simple. These adoption memoirs often didn’t show the loss the adoptee experienced, and often didn’t have much information at all about the first mother. If there was information, it was through the adoptive parent’s eyes. Adoptive parents often showed gratitude, but the picture was superficial. 

Adoptee and First Parent Memoirs Burst on the Scene

Adoptee stories and those of first mothers are now filling the memoir shelf and also filling the gap that once existed of firsthand accounts from the less visible people in adoption. It is hard to say how many memoirs exist that are written by adoptees and first mothers. Amazon lists over a hundred titles relating to adoptee memoirs. (9) One reason these memoirs can be hard to discover is that sometimes the author decides to tell their story without waiting to drum up an audience or get an agent or a recognized publishing house. (10) Adoptees and others who are educating us about the other side of adoption are self-publishing and promoting books on their own. This type of writing may not grab headlines or prominent shelving in a bookstore, so these memoirs may be more difficult to find.

Some are helping us understand the landscape of memoirs by publishing compilations or reviews of a number of memoirs in one place. Marianne Novy, a University of Pittsburgh Professor Emerita, decided she would read 47 memoirs on her own and put her analysis in a book. (11) She brings out ideas that she learned from the memoirs for the rest of us. One lesson she learned is that open adoption, as wonderful as it can be for some families, sometimes ends up reopening the adoption wound for some first mothers. Their pain is re-lived in their interaction with the child being raised by others. (12) This just shows that some of the things we try to convince ourselves will make adoption more tolerable for everyone involved don’t always have the effect we intend. 

Why are Memoirs Important?

Learning how individual adoptees see their lives can show us the pride they take in their heritage and family trees. We can see the struggles they feel with identity and how that relates to the families they choose to make for themselves as they grow up. (13)They sometimes show us how mental illness and hardship can have long-term consequences, sometimes directly related to the losses they suffered from foster care or adoption. (14)

Memoirs are the truth we have about the many ways adoption and foster care shape lives in reality. They can help us understand how to research and learn better and more efficiently by focusing on the things adoptees and first mothers tell us are important. Seeking out these stories should be a part of our lives as allies in adoption and foster care and should affect how we support the people touched by adoption and foster care in our everyday lives.

Sources

  1. “Excerpt: ‘The Girls Who Went Away’.” ABC news, 25 July 2006, abcnews.go.com/GMA/Books/story?id=2234195&page=1.
  2. Doyle, Alicia. “Women recall stigma of ‘Baby Scoop Era’.” VC Star, 23 Jan. 2017, http://www.vcstar.com/story/news/local/communities/simi-valley/2017/01/23/simi-woman-describes-life-during-baby-scoop-era/96740180/.
  3. Altschuler, Glenn C. “Adoption In the Baby Scoop Era.” Psychology Today, 26 Jan. 2021, http://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/is-america/202101/adoption-in-the-baby-scoop-era.
  4. Herman, Ellen. “Adoption History Project: Adoption Statistics.” uoregon.edu, 24 Feb. 2012, pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/adoptionstatistics.htm#:~:text=Historical%20statistics%20on%20domestic%20adoptions,II%2C%20adoption%20statistics%20were%20incomplete.
  5. “Encyclopedia of Human Behavior: Adoption Studies.” Science Direct, 2012, http://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/adoption-studies.
  6. Keyes, Margaret A., et al. “The Mental Health of U.S. Adolescents Adopted in Infancy.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/, 20 June 2015, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4475346/.
  7. Sharpe, Michele. “Reviews of Three Adoption Memoirs: All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung; and Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe by Lori Jakiela; An Adoptee Lexicon by Karen Pickell.” Hippocampus Magazine, 19 Oct. 2019, hippocampusmagazine.com/2019/10/reviews-of-three-adoption-memoirs-all-you-can-ever-know-by-nicole-chung-and-belief-is-its-own-kind-of-truth-maybe-by-lori-jakiela-an-adoptee-lexicon-by-karen-pi.
  8. Tanner, Amy. “The Unspoken Loss of Adoption’s Happy Endings.” Cherry Hill Counseling, 13 May 2019, cherryhillcounseling.com/the-unspoken-loss-of-adoptions-happy-endings/.
  9. Amazon.com
  10. LaFrank, Gabrielle. “Ideas to ink: How I self-published a children’s book on open adoption.” openadopt.org, 12 Mar. 2020, openadopt.org/blog/adoptees/ideas-to-ink-how-i-self-published-a-childrens-book-on-open-adoption/139/.
  11. Patton, Joshua M. “Review: ‘Adoption Memoirs’ and the illusion of happily ever after.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 12 Oct. 2024, http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/books/2024/10/12/review-adoption-memoirs-inside-stories-marianne-novy/stories/202410130070.
  12. Spiering, Charlyn. “What Adoption Memoirs Can Teach us: A Talk With Marianne Novy.” Adoption Uncovered, 6 Mar. 2025, adoptionuncovered.com/2025/03/06/what-adoption-memoirs-can-teach-us-a-talk-with-marianne-novy/.
  13. “Adoptee Memoirs, Essays, and Anthologies.” Harlow’s Monkey, harlows-monkey.com/for-adoptees/adoptee-memoirs-and-narratives/.
  14. Bibliovault.org, http://www.bibliovault.org/BV.titles.epl?tquery=Adoptees.


One response to “We Don’t Know Enough About the Adoptee and First Parent Experience. Memoirs Can Help.”

  1. Thank you for the post on the complexities of adoption in the lives of adoptees and first parents. Last summer, my graphic memoir – graphic medicine book was released along with many other wonderful memoirs. I’m so happy to see a more realistic picture of what adoption is. If you have a list, I hope you have come across some of the books recently released. Thanks again for the post!

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