NO FINER PLACE

Tullier chronicles the ways in which a DNA test led to discovery and acceptance in this memoir.

The author’s lifelong feeling of not knowing where she belonged was intensified when, in 2016, a notification from her Ancestry.com account about a “close family” match upended her world. She learned that J. Scott Tullier, her “loving, generous, and utterly reliable father,” was not her biological dad—a family friend, Flynn, who’d been a classmate of his at dental school in Atlanta in the 1950s, was. Tullier’s mother (who remains unnamed throughout the book and is described as an unreliable narrator who has spewed venom toward the author since childhood) readily admitted that Flynn was Tullier’s biological father, describing her conception as similar to choosing a prize bull to breed. Although Flynn died before her discovery, the author reconnected with four half siblings and an aunt whom she had known as acquaintances, finding acceptance and discovering a distant connection to the famous German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the process. She also became closer to family and friends of J. Scott’s as she embarked on a trip through his native Louisiana with his ashes. (J. Scott had dementia and died in 2018.) As Tullier sorted family artifacts as she prepared for a move to Maine and rebuilt relationships with maternal relatives, she uncovered more evidence of her mother’s lifetime of sadistic acts. Reflecting on her mother’s many secrets (most notably her infidelity and her status as the wife of a closeted gay man), the author felt some “empathy tinged with a touch of compassion” for the woman, who died in 2017. With the support of therapists and friends, she did the hard psychological work of accepting herself and her (genetically linked or not) family. Tullier writes honestly of her emotions and feelings, demonstrating remarkable grace toward all concerned. Her explanations of the technical ins-and-outs of DNA matching are clear, as are those of the historical backgrounds of German and Acadian migrations. This engrossing account of the intense effects of DNA matching may remind readers of Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance (2019).

A fascinating and affecting account of a misattributed parentage experience.