Karen Pickell, founder of Adoptee Reading, will join Haley Radke, host of the podcast Adoptees On, in moderating a pop-up book club to discuss the memoir An Affair with My Mother. Author Caitríona Palmer will join the discussion, which will take place April 3-30 via a closed Facebook group.
Caitríona recently spoke with Haley about meeting her mother, writing the book, and navigating its aftereffects. You can listen to the episode at Adoptees On here.
If you’d like to join the April discussion with Caitríona, you can find the Facebook group here. You must have a Facebook account to participate. Comments posted within the group can be seen only by other group members, however be aware that your membership in the group is public and, therefore, may be seen by others on Facebook outside of the group.
After April, the group and all discussions there will be deleted. A summary of the conversation between the moderators and Caitríona will be published at Adoptee Reading in May.
An Affair with My Mother can be ordered from Amazon via the link below, and a tiny fraction of the revenue from these purchases will be received by Adoptee Reading to help maintain this website.
An Affair with My Mother: A Story of Adoption, Secrecy and Love
by Caitríona Palmer
Caitríona Palmer had a happy childhood in Dublin, raised by loving adoptive parents. But when she was in her late twenties, she realized that she had a strong need to know the woman who had given birth to her. She was able to locate her birth mother, Sarah, and they developed a strong attachment. But Sarah set one painful condition to this joyous new relationship: she wished to keep it–to keep Caitríona–secret from her family, from her friends, from everyone. Who was Sarah, and why did she want to preserve a decades-old secret? An Affair with My Mother tells the story of Caitríona’s quest to answer these questions, and of the intense, furtive “affair” she and her mother conducted in carefully chosen locations around Dublin. By turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, An Affair with My Mother is a searing portrait of the social and familial forces that left Sarah–and so many other unwed Irish mothers of her generation–frightened, traumatized, and bereft. It is also a beautifully written account of a remarkable relationship that survived seemingly intolerable pressures.