Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Category: Memoir/Autobiography

  • After the Truth: A Memoir

    After the Truth: A Memoir

    by Paige Adams Strickland

    What do you do when you are an adopted adult, trying to balance biological and adoptive families in addition to your own home life? How could being adopted have an impact on your career, your friendships and parenting decisions? What do you do when your…

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  • Adopted: An Adoptee’s Memoir of Healing Love

    Adopted: An Adoptee’s Memoir of Healing Love

    by David C. Alves

    Adopted touches on the issues nearly every child or adult adoptee must face on the way to maturity, wholeness, and redemption. Along the way my personal narrative provides valuable insights to adoptive and foster parents who long to see their children whole. And to adult adoptees…

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  • Searching for Enda

    Searching for Enda

    by Paul G. Denny

    Everyone has a story to tell. Some are of heartbreak, some of loss, some of passion. In Searching for Enda, a brave man asking questions about his adoption in Britain leads him to discover buried secrets swept under a conservative carpet of shame. We all…

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  • Walk Away (Kindle Single)

    Walk Away (Kindle Single)

    by Michele Leavitt

    Walk Away is the unflinching and inspiring story of how author Michele Leavitt lived through the violence of her adolescence, how that violence haunted her through her escape to college and law school, and how she ultimately came to rise out of it to a…

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  • Puzzles, Pieces and Choices: A memoir of my struggle for understanding and closure

    Puzzles, Pieces and Choices: A memoir of my struggle for understanding and closure

    by R. J. Redmond

    Every family has secrets, but I never dreamed my position within ours was the subject of the biggest secret of all. As with any truth untold, there were clues along the way but none obvious. Honesty was a primary value in our home, so I…

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  • Bonded at Birth: An Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots

    Bonded at Birth: An Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots

    by Gloria Oren

    Bonded at Birth: An Adoptee’s Search for Her Roots is a story of loss, survival, determination, and persistence. It covers one state, three countries, and two continents. It covers sixteen years of searching and a little over four decades since her first adoption. After growing…

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  • Overwhelmed by God’s Grace: Uncovering the Truth About Adoption

    Overwhelmed by God’s Grace: Uncovering the Truth About Adoption

    by Margaret Etcher Theriault

    Margaret always knew she was adopted. She was told she was “chosen” and “special” but she always wondered why her roots needed to be such a big secret. When the truth finally came out, the struggle for acceptance and belonging intensified. But then there came healing…

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  • Fumbling Toward Divinity: The Adoption Scriptures

    Fumbling Toward Divinity: The Adoption Scriptures

    by Craig Hickman

    Craig Hickman had had enough of the secrets and cover-ups and lies and was determined to solve the mystery of his roots. An estimated 7 million Americans are adopted. Depending on their age, many were adopted under the secrecy and shame of the closed adoption…

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  • Mommy Dearest

    Mommy Dearest

    by Christina Crawford

    Memoir and exposé written by Christina Crawford, the adopted daughter of actress Joan Crawford. In the book, Christina Crawford claims that she was a victim of child abuse during her mother’s battle with alcoholism and that her mother was more concerned about being an actress…

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  • Problem Child

    Problem Child

    by Caradoc King

    Adopted at eighteen months, Caradoc King was brought up in a large and growing family. His adoptive mother, a complex woman, was unable to bond with her newly adopted son and treated him with a harshness bordering on cruelty. At the age of six, he…

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  • Letters to My Birthmother: An Adoptee’s Diary of Her Search for Her Identity

    Letters to My Birthmother: An Adoptee’s Diary of Her Search for Her Identity

    by Amy E. Dean

    A memoir in unsent letters written by an adoptee and former foster child. Adoptee Author: Amy E. Dean Publication Year: 1991 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews:  All Bookshop and Amazon links on this site are affiliate links. We earn a small commission to help keep Adoptee…

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  • Birthright: The Guide to Search and Reunion for Adoptees, Birthparents, and Adoptive Parents

    Birthright: The Guide to Search and Reunion for Adoptees, Birthparents, and Adoptive Parents

    by Jean A. S. Strauss

    What happens when an adoptee decides to locate a birthparent or a birthparent wants to find a child given up long ago? How does one search for people whose names one does not know? And what happens during a reunion? In 1983, Jean A. S.…

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  • Secrets, Spies and Spotted Dogs: Unravelling mysterious family connections behind a secret adoption

    Secrets, Spies and Spotted Dogs: Unravelling mysterious family connections behind a secret adoption

    by Jane Eales

    A simple need for her birth certificate leads Jane, aged 19, to a devastating secret: she is adopted. Stunned, Jane is sworn to secrecy and forbidden to search for her biological family – a promise she honours until the death of her adoptive parents. A…

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  • The Boy from Nowhere

    The Boy from Nowhere

    by Gregor Fisher with Melanie Reid

    The warm, funny memoir of Gregor Fisher, the much loved Scottish actor best known for Rab C. Nesbitt, told as he uncovers his dramatic family history. Growing up in the Glasgow suburbs, Gregor was 14 when he asked where he was christened and was told…

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  • You Don’t Look Adopted

    You Don’t Look Adopted

    by Anne Heffron

    Adoption can be wonderful and tricky. There is love of the parents, love of the child, but there can also be problems. The adopted child often wonders Who am I? Who was I? Why was I given up? When you don’t have a sense of…

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  • Thank God I Was Adopted ‘Cause DNA Is No Joke!

    Thank God I Was Adopted ‘Cause DNA Is No Joke!

    by Pekitta Tynes with Janice Young

    Abandoned in a shot house and left without a birth certificate, I was an UNKNOWN. I lived in foster care and later adopted into a wonderful family. After 35-years of searching, I found my biological family through DNA testing. This book is an inspirational journey…

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  • The Truth So Far: A Detective’s Journey To Reunite with Her Birth Family

    The Truth So Far: A Detective’s Journey To Reunite with Her Birth Family

    by Jennifer Dyan Ghoston

    How do you use a document like the amended birth certificate given to an adoptee as a legal representation of the entire truth? In this memoir, Jennifer Dyan Ghoston examines that question based on her role in law enforcement for over two decades. She shares…

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  • Ten Ways Not To Commit Suicide: A Memoir

    Ten Ways Not To Commit Suicide: A Memoir

    by Darryl McDaniels with Darrell Dawsey

    As one third of the legendary rap group Run D.M.C., Darryl “DMC” McDaniels—aka Legendary MC, The Devastating Mic Controller, and the King of Rock—had it all: talent, money, fame, prestige. While hitting #1 on the Billboard charts was exhilarating, the group’s success soon became overwhelming.…

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  • Heartlines: The Year I Met My Other Mother

    Heartlines: The Year I Met My Other Mother

    by Susannah McFarlane and Robin Leuba

    In 1965, Robin, unmarried and pregnant, comes to Melbourne to give birth and give her baby up for adoption, then returns to Perth to resume her life having never seen her baby. After 10 days alone, the baby is taken home, named Susannah, and made…

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  • A Girl Named Connie

    A Girl Named Connie

    by Carol Perkins with Connie Wilson

    In 1946, being adopted was a social curse and a lifelong sentence. I was born that year, but not to prosperous business owners, Bill and Cloteel Wilson as I had thought. When I was six weeks old, they brought me to their rural Kentucky town,…

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  • My Secret

    My Secret

    by Joanne E. Sayre

    What if you found out that you were adopted and everything you thought you knew about your family, your security, was shattered? My Secret is about my 40 year quest for truth about who I am. But, more than that, this story is about overcoming…

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  • An Australian Son

    An Australian Son

    by Gordon Matthews

    Autobiography of Gordon Matthews. Adopted at birth, he grew up in the 1950s in middle class Kew. Through a series of circumstances Matthews came to believe he was of Aboriginal descent. Passionately, he formally embraced this identity and acquired a profile in the diplomatic service.…

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  • Adopted Out: A Memoir of Closed Adoption and Blackness

    Adopted Out: A Memoir of Closed Adoption and Blackness

    by S.M. Ezeff

    While searching for her birth family, S.M. Ezeff discovered there was a shortage of African American adoptees speaking out and came to realize that agency-based adoption is still taboo within the African American community. Constantly being asked if her adoptive parents were Black, she learned…

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  • The Mysteries of Eva Miller Revealed

    The Mysteries of Eva Miller Revealed

    by Eva D. Miller

    Former American Idol contestant Eva Miller takes you on an inspiring journey of both tragedy and triumph. Through her courage and faith Eva set out on a mission to unravel the mysteries that shrouded her life, she never knew what could possibly await her. Join…

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  • An Affair with My Mother: A Story of Adoption, Secrecy and Love

    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…

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  • Three More Words

    Three More Words

    by Ashley Rhodes-Courter

    Ashley Rhodes-Courter spent a harrowing nine years of her life in fourteen different foster homes. Her memoir, Three Little Words, captivated audiences everywhere and went on to become a New York Times bestseller. Now Ashley reveals the nuances of life after foster care: College and…

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  • Three Little Words: A Memoir

    Three Little Words: A Memoir

    by Ashley Rhodes-Courter

    An inspiring true story of the tumultuous nine years Ashley Rhodes-Courter spent in the foster care system, and how she triumphed over painful memories and real-life horrors to ultimately find her own voice. “Sunshine, you’re my baby and I’m your only mother. You must mind…

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  • The Mistress’s Daughter

    The Mistress’s Daughter

    by A. M. Homes

    The acclaimed writer A. M. Homes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with a family of his own. The Mistress’s Daughter is the…

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  • Billie’s Kid: A True Story About Adoption

    Billie’s Kid: A True Story About Adoption

    by Steve Tucker

    Jazz musician Steve Tucker has always known he was adopted and has spent nearly fifty years tormented by thoughts of who he is, where he came from, and whom he looks like. Like many adoptees, he embarks on a journey of discovery when he goes…

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  • Marilyn

    Marilyn

    by Amanda Ngoho Reavey

    Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey’s first book, Marilyn, began as an exploration through somatic experiments on what it means to stay and became a fragmented map of the immigration system, the international adoption process, and family. How do you articulate disenfranchised grief? How does a person who…

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