Jessica Lost: A Story of Birth, Adoption & The Meaning of Motherhood

In mostly alternating chapters the mother and daughter co-authors tell their story of loss, search and reunion. As an adoptee, I identified most deeply with Jil’s (the daughter/adoptee) story.

Born in 1956, so many of Jil’s cultural references are the same as mine. Additionally, she attended UW-Madison and many of the places she mentions are familiar. For me she got the emotions just right. Growing up she felt that she didn’t quite fit, she felt a little bit like a fraud. She was anxious about searching, not wanting to upset her adoptive parents, whom she loved. She worried what her birth mother would think. She was ambivalent, obsessed, joyful, and sad. In the end, she feels satisfyingly whole.

Bunny’s story (the birth mother) is equally compelling in its portrayal of the loss that she endured when she surrendered her daughter and the joy she felt at reuniting with her daughter. The friend that loaned me this book is a birth mother and said she felt that Bunny’s story was also spot on.

No matter how many reunions I hear about or read about it still feels like stepping onto a rollercoaster. You know what the ride is about, but you’re never quite prepared for the exhilaration. This story is no different. I highly recommend it!

Jessica Lost: A Story of Birth, Adoption & The Meaning of Motherhood by Bunny Crumpacker and Jil Picariello (2011, 224 pages).

Kathy K on A Gate at the Stairs

I felt there was a lot of relevant commentary in A Gate At the Stairs but too dense to read all at once and buried under a lot of distracting sideways musings that made it hard to pull out the good stuff of the story. Nevertheless, I did decide to finish it this week and finished it this morning.

I kind of had a like it/hate it reaction to this book and in the end I decided I needed to finish it to see where the main character ended up. I actually thought the very last part of the book was better than all the rest of it as Tassie reacts to her brother’s death. I particularly found intriguing her climbing into her brother’s coffin as horrific as it was, it made a real statement about how much we can love someone no matter what state they are in. I found the father’s comments at the funeral particularly poignant and dead on:

“What can a man say about losing his boy?” my father cried out, finally. He had raised his voice as if he were calling. “His only son? Well! I miss him more than any words can remotely convey. He was not just a good son, a good person. He was the very best kind.” That was all he said before his face clenched and purpled and he had to turn and come back down. – Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs.

I also found this idea to be very relevant to our book club reading and one that might help us go beyond the obvious in our discussion in future book club readings:

“I had also learned in literature—perhaps as in life—one had to speak not of what the author intended but of what a story intended for herself. The creator was inconvenient—God was dead. But the creation itself had a personality and hopes and its own desires and plans and little winks and dance steps and collaged intent. In this way Jacques Derrida overlapped with Walt Disney. The story itself had feet and a mouth, could walk and talk and speak of its own yearnings.”— Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

Banned Books Week

September 24−October 1, 2011 is Banned Books Week. Go ahead, be naughty, read a challenged book. For more information on BB Week and a list of the most challenged books, go to the American Library Association’s website: http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/bannedbooksweek/index.cfm

From Merriam Webster's Word of the Day

bildungsroman \BIL-doonks-roh-mahn\ -noun
a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character