But what I was really doing was unspooling a narrative fifty-four years long.” “I ran through these facts as I tried to fall asleep each night, as if recounting them might help me make more sense of things. The new facts of her life are so impossible to believe that she pursues new test results from several additional companies, and the quest for the truth is her only anchor in unfamiliar, terrifying territory. Inheritance opens as Shapiro, at age 54, receives DNA test results that are dramatically inconsistent with her understanding of who she is. It’s a hard book to discuss without spoiling the surprises that make it such an exciting read, and I’ll try not to give too much away. Although her story is unique to her, it offers a way of thinking about our changing, uncertain times. Inheritance adds significantly to Shapiro’s body of work while plugging into some of our culture’s most pressing concerns–identity, technology, and medical ethics, among others. So it’s reasonable to ask a simple question: What could be left to say? That number includes at least three memoirs. Sure, there are narrative twists that lead to unexpected epiphanies-but fewer and fewer books whose plot and pacing compel me to page ahead of my place in the text, panting for answers.ĭani Shapiro’s Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love does that by telling a remarkable story with the empathy and eloquence that characterize Shapiro’s previous nine books. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in-a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.' ( Amazon.There aren’t many genuine literary thrillers out there, especially among today’s memoirs. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. Inheritance is a book about secrets-secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. She woke up one morning and her entire history-the life she had lived-crumbled beneath her.

In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father.

'What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?

Inheritance dani shapiro reviews