Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Memoir/Biography

  • Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World

    Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World

    by Catherine E. McKinley

    Brimming with rich, electrifying tales of the precious dye and its ancient heritage, Indigo is also the story of a personal quest: Catherine McKinley is the descendant of a clan of Scots who wore indigo tartan; Jewish “rag traders”; a Massachusetts textile factory owner; and…

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  • Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery

    Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery

    by Harrison Mooney

    A powerful, experiential journey from white cult to Black consciousness: Harrison Mooney’s riveting story of self-discovery lifts the curtain on the trauma of transracial adoption and the internalized antiblackness at the heart of the white evangelical Christian movement. Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man the same way…

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  • Ithaka: A Daughter’s Memoir of Being Found

    Ithaka: A Daughter’s Memoir of Being Found

    by Sarah Saffian

    Adopted as an infant twenty-three years before, living happily in New York, Sarah had been “found” by her biological parents despite her reluctance to embrace them. In this searing, lyrical memoir, Sarah chronicles her painful journey from confusion and anger to acceptance and, finally, reunion–but not…

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  • Kids Like Me in China

    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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  • Killing Karoline

    Killing Karoline

    by Sara-Jayne King

    Born Karoline King in 1980 in Johannesburg South Africa, Sara-Jayne (as she will later be called by her adoptive parents) is the result of an affair, illegal under apartheid’s Immorality Act, between a white British woman and her black South African employee.Her story reveals the…

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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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  • Life In-Between: A Story of Adoption, Recovery and Connection

    Life In-Between: A Story of Adoption, Recovery and Connection

    by Julia F. Richardson

    Born in 1958 and given up for adoption Julia’s story is an exploration of a search for love, belonging and identity. It is a story of relinquishment and reunion, of trauma and hope. It is a tale of overcoming addiction and learning to live with…

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  • Looking Into Alice’s Eyes : An Adoption Journey of Loss, Self-Discovery, and Peace

    Looking Into Alice’s Eyes : An Adoption Journey of Loss, Self-Discovery, and Peace

    by Robert L. DuBois

    This is an adoption story of two people; a birth mother and a son who briefly meet on a turbulent afternoon in 1967 in Flint, Michigan. They spend the next half century separated by a few miles and a million regrets. Various circumstances keep them…

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  • Lost and Found: A Memoir of Mothers

    Lost and Found: A Memoir of Mothers

    by Kate St. Vincent Vogl

    She swore she would never let her birthmother into her life, but then her mom died of ovarian cancer and her birthmother found her through the obituary. Hard to argue with fate. Harder still to let go of childhood promises. This memoir explores what it…

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  • Love & Genetics: A True Story of Adoption, Surrogacy, and the Meaning of Family

    Love & Genetics: A True Story of Adoption, Surrogacy, and the Meaning of Family

    by Mark MacDonald and Rachel Elliott

    When a family secret comes to light, lives are changed forever in this honest, beautiful, and sometimes painful memoir. When Mark, adopted at birth, set out to find his genetic family as an adult, he found something he never expected–three full-blood siblings, including a persistent…

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  • Lucky Bastard

    Lucky Bastard

    by Anthony Akerman

    When he was ten years old, the author was told he’d been adopted. It was a seismic event that turned his world upside down. Nobody was who he thought they were. His mother wasn’t his mother; his father wasn’t his father; his sister wasn’t his…

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  • Lucky Girl

    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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  • 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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  • Memoirs of an Adoptee: One Person’s DNA Discoveries, Reflections and Insights

    Memoirs of an Adoptee: One Person’s DNA Discoveries, Reflections and Insights

    by Craig Harris

    A middle-aged man’s search for his biological family. Having lived his whole life thinking about where he came from, while yearning to understand the missing answers to his self-actualization, DNA matches opened the door for him to get answers from genealogical research. With each discovery,…

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  • Miss New York Has Everything

    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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  • Mixed Korean: Our Stories

    Mixed Korean: Our Stories

    Edited by Cerrissa Kim, Sora Kim-Russell, Mary-Kim Arnold, Katherine Kim

    From the struggles of the Korean War, to the modern dilemmas faced by those who are mixed race, comes an assortment of stories that capture the essence of what it is to be a mixed Korean. With common themes of exclusion, and recollections of not…

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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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  • Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story

    Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story

    by Sarah Myer

    Sarah has always struggled to fit in. Born in South Korea and adopted at birth by a white couple, she grows up in a rural community with few Asian neighbors. People whisper in the supermarket. Classmates bully her. She has trouble containing her anger in…

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  • Mother Me: An Adopted Woman’s Journey to Motherhood

    Mother Me: An Adopted Woman’s Journey to Motherhood

    by Zara H. Phillips

    The adopted daughter of loving parents, Zara Phillips nonetheless felt out of place in her family and a misfit in the world around her. Although cherished by a well-meaning mother and father, she grew up feeling deeply insecure and alone, consumed by a void she found…

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  • Mum’s the Word!

    Mum’s the Word!

    by Lorna Little

    What happens when you receive a piece of information that changes your life? Mum’s the Word is not just one way to react, but also a 40,000-word memoir that takes you through how the author handled such news. Suspense builds as a story of family…

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  • My Fathers’ Daughter: A Story of Family and Belonging

    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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  • My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past

    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…

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  • My Life: The Journey Of An Adoptee

    My Life: The Journey Of An Adoptee

    by Jim Armstrong

    My Life is an autobiography of my life as an adopted child. Adoption can be an emotional roller coaster for many adopted children. In this book i have provided my life journey and wish to share my journey so other adopted people know that they are…

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  • My Name Is Why

    My Name Is Why

    by Lemn Sissay

    How does a government steal a child and then imprison him? How does it keep it a secret? This story is how. At the age of seventeen, after a childhood in a foster family followed by six years in care homes, Norman Greenwood was given…

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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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  • Mystic Masquerade: An Adoptee’s Search for Truth

    Mystic Masquerade: An Adoptee’s Search for Truth

    by Valerie Naiman

    Mystic Masquerade: An Adoptee’s Search for Truth is an epic story of adoption that weaves together DNA, ancient wisdom, esoteric knowledge and suppressed information about humanity’s origins. Adopted at birth in Miami, Valerie Naiman healed the trauma of infant separation by embarking on a spiritual…

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  • Never Stop Walking: A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World

    Never Stop Walking: A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World

    by Christina Rickardsson; translated by Tara F. Chace

    Christiana Mara Coelho was born into extreme poverty in Brazil. After spending the first seven years of her life with her loving mother in the forest caves outside São Paulo and then on the city streets, where they begged for food, she and her younger…

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  • No Returns Without Original Receipt

    No Returns Without Original Receipt

    by Diane McConnell

    Renewed courage after learning the final piece of my true heritage has overcome my life-long fear of telling my story. Every adoptee has the right, and many the need, to discover her or his true history, ancestry and identity. Knowledge gives power and confidence. With…

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