Category: Memoir/Autobiography
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Restored: Pursuing Wholeness When a Relationship Is Broken
by Deanna Doss Shrodes
Have your hopes been dashed into pieces when you tried to make a relationship work and the other person didn’t respond as you wished? Have you asked someone to forgive you, but he or she didn’t respond as you desired? Have you prayed for healing…
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The Mouse Room
by Susan Ito
Susan Ito is a struggling college student, a young adult on the cusp of parental independence, when she meets her birth mother for the first time. Instead of launching into adulthood, she finds herself entangled in longing for this new kind of mother love where…
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Saving Grace: A Story of Adoption
by L.B. Johnson
It started with a piece of paper–a birth certificate, sent to the author’s parents long after her birth. There is much history in that piece of paper. For she was born to an unwed mother in the generation prior to Roe v. Wade, on a…
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A Family Apart: Sleuthing the Mysteries of Abandonment, Adoption and DNA
by Craig A. Steffen
A Family Apart: Sleuthing the Mysteries of Abandonment, Adoption and DNA is a fascinating ride into the methodical quest of an orphan to uncover the truth about his origins. Even more, this book delves into the questions that come from being uncertain about the realities…
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Everything You Ever Wanted: A Memoir
by Jillian Lauren
In her younger years, Jillian Lauren was a college dropout, a drug addict, and an international concubine in the Prince of Brunei’s harem, an experience she immortalized in in her bestselling memoir, Some Girls. In her thirties, Jillian’s most radical act was learning the steadying power of…
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Some Girls: My Life in a Harem
by Jillian Lauren
At eighteen, Jillian Lauren was an NYU theater school dropout with a tip about an upcoming audition. The “casting director” told her that a rich businessman in Singapore would pay pretty American girls $20,000 if they stayed for two weeks to spice up his parties.…
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I Knew You by Name: The Search for My Lost Mother
by Peggy Barnes
Peggy Barnes’ recently unsealed birth certificate arrived just after she buried the woman who raised her. She discovered her entire life had been a lie. She was born at The Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers to a young woman from the back hills of…
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Surviving Secrets
by Margaret Watson
A true story that reveals the strength and resilience of the human spirit in the face of betrayal, grief and loss. At age forty, Margaret Watson learned she was adopted. This shocking and confronting truth was previously unknown to her and turned her whole world…
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Kids Like Me in China
by Ying Ying Fry (with Amy Klatzkin)
In this first view of China adoption from a child’s perspective, eight-year-old Ying Ying Fry returns to her orphanage to remember what it is like and to write a story so that other adopted children will understand where they came from. Kids Like Me in…
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Back to My Roots: My Journey to China
by Yanina Verplanke
“Happy Life is starting from this moment” This slogan is written on the wall of the Chinese adoption bureau of Chongqing. It is quite applicable to the seventeen-month-old toddler De Xing Fu. She grows up as a happy-go-lucky kid in Goes, a town in Zeeland, under…
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Lucky Girl
by Mei-Ling Hopgood
In a true story of family ties, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood, one of the first wave of Asian adoptees to arrive in America, comes face to face with her past when her Chinese birth family suddenly requests a reunion after more than two decades. In 1974,…
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Red Dust Road
by Jackie Kay
From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, Jackie Kay’s journey in Red…
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Romania For Export Only: The Untold Story Of The Romanian Orphans
by Roelie Post
The untold story of the Romanian ‘orphans’ gives an insider’s look into the adoption kitchen, where the most used ingredients are political pressure and emotional blackmail. A nexus of adoption agencies, adoptive parents and politicians are using their powers to ensure that intercountry adoptions continue.…
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Cries of the Soul: The True Story of a Korean Adoptee’s Fight to Survive
by Khara Niné
In 1970, shortly after the death of her mother, and without the consent or even the knowledge of her father, a barely one year old girl is put up for foreign adoption in South Korea. She ends up in an adoptive family where she spends…
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You Belong to Us
by Molly McCaffrey
On April 5, 1970, Molly McCaffrey was born in a Catholic hospital and given up for adoption when she was six weeks old. Nearly thirty years later, she met her birth mother who had spent the time since McCaffrey’s birth working at that same hospital,…
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My Fathers’ Daughter: A Story of Family and Belonging
by Hannah Pool
What do you wear to meet your father for the first time? In 2004, Hannah Pool knew more about next season’s lipstick colors than she did about Africa: a beauty editor for The Guardian newspaper, she juggled lattes and cocktails, handbags and hangouts through her…
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Cricket: Secret Child of a Sixties Supermodel
by Susan Fedorko
Susie always knew she was adopted out at the early age of eleven months. She discovers at the age of forty who her biological family is. Susie discovers her birth mother is the first Native American supermodel “Cathee Dahmen.” This is her story. Adoptee Author: Susan…
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Two Peas In A Separated Pod: A True Story of Adoption
by Jeannie Lachman and Carole Sanguedolce
Take a journey with two women on the road to discoveries and realizations. Jeannie and Carole write about their lives growing up. Each is unaware of the other. Jeannie is raised in the Bronx, New York. She grows up knowing that she is adopted and…
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The Search for Anna Fisher
by Florence Fisher
The document lay in the bottom of the bureau drawer. Written in longhand was a name: Anna Fisher. “Who is Anna Fisher?” seven-year-old Florence asked her mother. The woman yanked the paper out of her hands and told her never again to mention that name.…
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Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited
by Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein
Elyse Schein had always known she was adopted, but it wasn’t until her mid-thirties while living in Paris that she searched for her biological mother. What she found instead was shocking: She had an identical twin sister. What’s more, after being separated as infants, she…
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Reunited: An Investigative Genealogist Unlocks Some of Life’s Greatest Family Mysteries
by Pamela Slaton (with Samantha Marshall)
In this poignant and heartwarming narrative, renowned genealogist Pamela Slaton tells the most striking stories from her incredibly successful career of reconnecting adoptees with long-lost birth parents. After a traumatic reunion with her own birth mother, Pamela Slaton realized two things: That she wanted to…
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Outer Search Inner Journey
by Peter Dodds
In this riveting memoir a woman in post World War II Germany relinquishes her infant son Peter to an orphanage where he’s adopted by American parents and brought to the United States. Separated from family of origin and ancestral homeland, Peter grows up alienated in…
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Ten Thousand Sorrows
by Elizabeth Kim
“I don’t know how old I was when I watched my mother’s murder, nor do I know how old I am today.” The illegitimate daughter of a peasant and an American GI, Elizabeth Kim spent her early years as a social outcast in her village…
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The Goodbye Baby: A Diary about Adoption
by Elaine Pinkerton
Anyone who was adopted or who has adopted a child will find The Goodbye Baby a comforting and inspiring read. It takes one on a journey through the thorny issues of adoption, a search for healing, and an inspiring finale. Adoptee Author: Elaine Pinkerton Publication Year: 2012…
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Dust of the Streets: The Journey of a Biracial Orphan of the Korean War
by Thomas Park Clement
Autobiography of a half and half Korean boy born in the middle of the Korean War found at age 5 on the streets of Seoul, post war, adopted into the U.S. who eventually grew up to be a medical device inventor with over two dozen…
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The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious
by Lori Jakiela
Her 70-year-old, cancer-stricken mother kills snakes with a broom. Her best friend believes in psychics and the Virgin Mary. Her new neighbor steals her CDs and her aunt sneaks cheese curls into the house. After seven years in New York, Lori Jakiela gives up her…
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Miss New York Has Everything
by Lori Jakiela
Her aunt was a nun who popped pills and did time in Narcotics Anonymous. Her father grew up during the Depression, believed he’d be the next Frank Sinatra, and ended up working in the mills. His daughter, Lori Jakiela, spent her suburban Pittsburgh childhood watching…
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Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe
by Lori Jakiela
Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe is a book about mapping lives–the lives we are born with and the lives we are allowed to make for ourselves. Belief is part adoption narrative and part meditation on family, motherhood, nature vs. nurture, and what…
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Prison Baby: A Memoir
by Deborah Jiang-Stein
Even at twelve years old Deborah Jiang-Stein, the adopted daughter of a progressive Jewish couple in Seattle, felt like an outsider. Her multiracial features set her apart from her well-intentioned white parents, who evaded questions about her past. But when Deborah discovered a letter revealing…
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My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past
by Jennifer Teege and Nikola Sellmair (translated by Carolin Sommer)
This is the extraordinary and moving memoir of a woman who learns that her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the brutal Nazi commandant depicted in Schindler’s List. When Jennifer Teege, a German-Nigerian woman, happened to pluck a library book from the shelf, she had no idea…