Is it just me, or are adoption-centered stories everywhere these days?
I don’t write fiction (spare me the cracks about fake news, etc.) but I sure do like to read it.
An acquaintance suggested, “Little Fires Everywhere” a novel by Celeste Ng.
It’s a No. 1 New York Times bestseller from 2017 that topped “best book” lists from GQ to Southern Living and has an enviable 180,802 four- and five-star ratings on Amazon.
(My books each have about 300 such ratings; “Wicked Takes the Witness Stand” tops the list with a whopping 363.)
Ng’s novel follows the upstanding and wealthy Richardson family of Shaker Heights, Ohio, and the suspicious-seeming mother-daughter tenants that upend their comfortable lives.
The book received rave reviews, the writing is compelling and full of drama. And, in its adoption-related storyline, I’ll give you one guess as to who is who.
The rich, well-connected Richardsons support their equally rich and well-connected friends who adopt a baby in a transracial adoption.
The mother-daughter tenants — Mia and Pearl — are flighty, broke, indecisive, transient and hiding a family secret.
I also recently read “The Lost Ones” by Sheena Kamal (suggested by online algorithm) and again the writing itself was top notch.
Like Ng, Kamal received critical praise — “searing” said Kirkus Reviews, and “an intriguing twist on the standard missing persons thriller that’s raw, violent and thought provoking,” said Library Journal.
And … when it came to the characters, here we go again.
The troubled woman is (of course) the woman who gave her baby up for adoption and the psychologically damaged runaway is (of course) that baby as a teen.
Apparently, even talented novelists cannot conjure a mentally strong woman relinquishing her child or an adoptee growing up to be capable and happy, not because of adoption but in spite of it.
For the real scoop, I’d suggest fiction writers speak with sociologist Gretchen Sisson or read her new book, “Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.”
Sisson conducted a long-term study of adoption, interviewed about 100 mothers who’d placed their children for adoption and in the process exploded a whole lot of myths.
She recently spoke to me about her work and her book.
“As a researcher, it was an endless frustration for me,” Sisson said, of the lack of data about adoption. “We don’t even count private adoptions. We don’t value the experience enough to understand it.”
The State Department tracks international adoptions and the U.S. government tracks adoptions from children previously in foster care, Sisson said.
Domestic, private adoptions (of which I am one) are less well understood, allowing stereotypes of people and data to proliferate, unabated — efforts by Congress to collect data and perhaps remedy some of this have so far been unsuccessful.
“The fact that we have these political and cultural ideas about adoption, that bear no resemblance to the lived experiences of the people who are impacted by this system, is frustrating,” Sisson said.
Women can experience the grief of relinquishing a child, and also live a meaningful, optimistic and emotionally healthy life.
Adopted people can have a longing for their own genetic and pre-birth information, without it driving them to psychosis.
I’ve attended writer’s conferences, writer’s retreats, book-signings and author talks and have heard innumerable fiction writers repeat a well-worn and perhaps even accurate phrase — that good fiction tells an emotional truth without necessarily needing to state specific facts.
So far, I have not found emotional truth about adoption in fiction, and instead found writers who use society’s adoption myths for instant and easy drama.
Sisson, on the other hand, documents emotional and factual truths so lacking in the lazy, one-dimensional ways the media has traditionally covered adoption.
“We are surrounded by real, truthful stories of adoption every day, yet they remain invisible to us,” Sisson said.
I applaud Sisson’s efforts at visibility — five stars! — and hope to do the same with facts here in my little corner of northern Michigan.