REGIFTED

An adoptee’s decadelong mission to find her birth mother unearths both a painful family history and personal enlightenment in this debut memoir.

As a child, Byrne didn’t mind being adopted. Both of her siblings were also adoptees, and it felt unique in her South Bend, Indiana, community. Still, her family was flawed: Her mother, Delphine, a narcissist she often refers to as “The Duchess,” was emotionally abusive and her father had checked out. Yet it wasn’t until the author was about to be a grandmother that the urge to seek out her ancestry, to “look in a mirror and see the face of my mother—not Delphine’s face, but of the woman who gave birth to me, and the woman who gave birth to her,” took hold. But Byrne was born in 1955, the era of closed adoptions, and her birth mother repeatedly denied her consent for contact. It would take years of internet sleuthing; sending letters to the organization that facilitated her adoption, Catholic Charities; and scouring eBay for clues. It was “as difficult as buttoning a blouse while wearing boxing gloves.” After a “miracle” vision from her aunt Dolores, Byrne finally struck gold. Her mother, Mary, lived in Michigan and, with some coaxing, finally agreed to meet. Mary got pregnant with the author in high school and was sent to a home for unwed mothers until Byrne’s birth. The author had been a secret ever since. Later, an Ancestry.com DNA test revealed Byrne’s identity to Mary’s family, who turned out to have known of the author’s existence the entire time. But Byrne’s relief at finally knowing her “tribe” was tempered by anger and resentment, especially when Mary could not provide her any information about her birth father and “everything was on Mary’s terms.”

What makes Byrne’s memoir so compelling is that, despite a life story riddled with secrecy, shame, and denial, she is not bitter or angry, offering forgiveness as easily as she presents her extravagant floral arrangements. She is remarkably cleareyed about how the decisions of others have impacted her life and her subsequent choices: “I’d undergone a smorgasbord of therapy and other forms of how-to-un-fuck-up my life.” The narration straddles a vulnerable and conversational tone, offsetting heavy passages, such as one about her rape at the age of 13, with a self-deprecating inner monologue: “Ferchrissakes, Byrne, shuuuut. Uuuup.” The account is structured nonchronologically, opening with the author’s arrival at her birth mother’s house before retreating in time to contextualize how she came to what could be seen as an invasive decision. While the italicized self-talk can sometimes detract from what turns out to be a complicated, traumatic experience for Byrne, each chapter begets new layers that will engage readers as she learns more about her birth family and, subsequently, herself. This is not a story of tearful family reunions and new bonds forged after decades of obfuscation but of a woman’s hunt for closure. While meeting her birth family did not cure the maelstrom that’s lived inside her since childhood, Byrne still revels in the hard-won epiphany that who she is really is “all up to me.”

A poignant account of a resilient woman’s complex search for clues about her history.