I’ve read adoption memoirs before, but I’ve never felt this seen. Jean Widner didn’t just tell her story. She opened the door to every hidden corner of what adoption really is. She brings in so many voices from adoptees, birth mothers, adoptive parents, and social workers, and shows that adoption isn’t one simple story with a happy ending. It is layered. It is messy. It is full of love and loss, shame and longing, silence and survival.
This isn’t a book written just for adoptees. It is a book written with us. She doesn’t avoid the uncomfortable parts. She names them. She talks about the guilt and the grief, the split between who you were supposed to be and who you had to become. She talks about the ache you carry without even knowing where it began. She says the things so many of us were forced to bury. That being adopted can mean both gratitude and abandonment. That love is not a cure for loss.
What hit me the hardest is that she doesn’t just stay in her own story. This book includes birth mothers, adoptive parents, professionals, and adoptees. It shows how the entire system is built on silence and good intentions that often do not meet the real needs of the people involved. Jean doesn’t try to soften the truth. She lets it stand as it is.
She writes about identity and what it means to not know where you come from. She shows how that kind of not knowing shapes you. She talks about how adoption is often wrapped in feel-good stories while the pain is pushed aside. She doesn’t try to make it prettier than it is. She tells the truth, and she trusts the reader can handle it.
Every time I thought I had read something that only applied to me, she opened it up wider. She showed that these feelings live in so many of us. That we are not alone in the confusion or the ache. She gave words to things I have carried my entire life but never said out loud.
Jean, you didn’t hold back. You didn’t try to make it comfortable. You wrote it the way it needed to be written. And I am grateful for that.
If you are looking for a book that doesn’t just tell the story of adoption but tells the truth behind it, this is the one. It will not give you easy answers, but it will make you feel less alone in the questions. And sometimes that is everything.
-Jessica Rosenfeld
