SOMEWHERE BLUEBIRDS FLY

A debut memoir recounts a man’s troubled life and the painful search for the biological mother who gave him up for adoption.

Farrant was born in 1952 in Yonkers, New York, and quickly given up for adoption. His adoptive parents, Betty and Larry, raised him in Manhattan, an experience that was a “tumultuous” one for the author. The household was a thoroughly “toxic environment”—Larry was physically and emotionally abusive, his personality soured by a spate of professional disappointments. And while Betty was loving and kind, she was an alcoholic who was powerless to defend the author from Larry. As a result, Farrant was crippled by self-doubts and struggled with depression and anxiety. He would end up with several failed marriages and estranged from three of his children. He never had much interest in locating his biological mother, Barbara May Shinn, but finally realized, at the age of 64, that it was of the greatest importance to him: “And it was in that moment that I allowed myself to fully realize just how important it was to me to know my roots—that I had masked an inherent, burning desire with rational, yet disingenuous, excuses.” Farrant’s heartfelt memoir oscillates between an account of his emotionally bedraggled life and the search for the identity of his biological mother—she died in 2005. The author’s remembrance is lucidly, even elegantly composed and laced with a bold candor. In addition, he poignantly captures the pain of the alienation engendered by a loss of identity. But his recollection is largely a distinctively personal one and will be best appreciated by those who know him and bring to their reading an abiding curiosity about Farrant’s life.

An adoptee’s idiosyncratic account that will appeal to his family and friends.