Adoption & Being Adopted

The Primal Wound

Nancy Newton Verrier · 1993

Verrier, a psychotherapist and adoptive mother herself, argues that the separation of a baby from its birth mother leaves a mark, even in the earliest, pre-verbal adoptions, and that naming this “primal wound” is not an attack on adoption but a more honest foundation for it. For adoptees who have never quite been able to explain a grief they can’t remember the cause of, Verrier offers the first real language for it.

American Baby

Gabrielle Glaser · 2021

Glaser tells the true story of a teenager coerced into surrendering her son in 1961, and the decades-long, deliberately obstructed search that followed. It is investigative journalism rather than memoir, and it does not flinch from how exploitative closed-era adoption practices could be. For anyone whose adoption story includes secrecy or coercion, Glaser makes clear that the history, not the family, was often the problem.

Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew

Sherrie Eldridge · 1999

Eldridge, herself adopted, translates a child’s often-unspoken feelings — fear of abandonment, grief that has nowhere sanctioned to go, questions about a birth family — into language adoptive parents can actually use. For families wanting to talk about adoption honestly rather than around it, Eldridge supplies both the vocabulary and the reassurance that asking is safe.

The Language of Flowers

Vanessa Diffenbaugh · 2011

Victoria ages out of the foster system having never been successfully adopted, and Diffenbaugh traces, without sentimentality, what that specific absence of permanence does to a person’s capacity for trust and connection later on. It is as much about the children the system fails as the ones it places well.

Digging to America

Anne Tyler · 2006

Two families, meeting by coincidence at the same airport gate to collect their adopted daughters from Korea, take very different approaches to raising a child who arrived by a different route than most. Tyler is gentle and exact about how a family can be assembled deliberately, in full view of everyone, and still be entirely, ordinarily a family.

Lucky Boy

Shanthi Sekaran · 2017

Sekaran tells the same child’s story from two directions at once — his birth mother, an undocumented immigrant fighting to get him back, and the adoptive mother who has come to love him as her own. Neither woman is written as the villain. It is a rare, clear-eyed portrait of how much love, and how much loss, can be true on both sides of the same adoption.