Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Memoir/Biography

  • Rooted in Adoption: A Collection of Adoptee Reflections

    Rooted in Adoption: A Collection of Adoptee Reflections

    by Veronica Breaux and Shelby Kilgore

    Rooted in Adoption: A Collection of Adoptee Reflections is a collection of short narratives from those who have been adopted. Adoptees of various ages, backgrounds, and experiences were asked discuss the joys of adoption and the struggles of living a life of secrecy and lost…

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  • Sandwiched: A Memoir of Holding On and Letting Go

    Sandwiched: A Memoir of Holding On and Letting Go

    by Laurie James

    Laurie James spent most of her life wondering what it means to belong; loneliness dictated the choices she made. She rarely shared this secret with others, however; it was always hidden behind a carefree and can-do attitude. When she’s in her mid-forties, Laurie’s mother has…

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  • Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting

    Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting

    by Mary Gauthier

    Mary Gauthier was twelve years old when she was given her Aunt Jenny’s old guitar and taught herself to play with a Mel Bay basic guitar workbook. Music offered her a window to a world where others felt the way she did. Songs became lifelines…

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  • Saving Grace: A Story of Adoption

    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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  • 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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  • Searching For Me: An Adoptee’s Journey of Faith, Family, and Belonging

    Searching For Me: An Adoptee’s Journey of Faith, Family, and Belonging

    by Scott Sullivan

    Being given away for adoption just days after being born left a mystery around Scott Sullivan’s life that tugged at his analytical mind, fueling a sense of self-doubt throughout his introverted life that affected his friendships, his faith, and amplified his insecurities. Hoping to uncover…

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  • Searching for Mom: A Memoir

    Searching for Mom: A Memoir

    by Sara Easterly (with Linda Easterly)

    Searching for Mom is a “disarmingly honest” mother-daughter story. Sara Easterly spent a lifetime looking for the perfect mother. As an adoptee she had difficulties attaching to her mother, struggled with her faith, lived the effects of intergenerational wounding, and felt an inherent sense of being…

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  • Searching for the Castle: Backtrail of an Adoption

    Searching for the Castle: Backtrail of an Adoption

    by Barbara Leigh Ohrstrom

    Like cowboys turning in the saddle to look at where they came from, Searching for the Castle documents the backtrail of author Barbara Leigh Ohrstrom’s adoption. It begins with her urgency as an eighteen-year-old woman initiating her search for her birth parents. Her recollection includes…

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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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  • Shadows of the Night: How One Man Survived the Trauma of Adoption, the Snares of the Music Business, and Found His Birthmother and Seven Sisters

    Shadows of the Night: How One Man Survived the Trauma of Adoption, the Snares of the Music Business, and Found His Birthmother and Seven Sisters

    by D.L. Byron

    A gifted young man endured a tormented childhood at the hands of his mentally troubled adoptive mother. Told that his birth mother had died to give him life, he shouldered the blame yet still found the strength to attempt the impossible. With a week’s worth…

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  • She Named You Donna

    She Named You Donna

    by Julie Kerton

    It’s a January morning in 1976; Julie rips the hospital bracelet from her wrist and throws it across the room. As it lands, she doesn’t know that the sound will echo through the years. But the story doesn’t begin here. In a suburb north of…

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  • Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

    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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  • Somebody’s Daughter

    Somebody’s Daughter

    by Zara H. Phillips

    Zara H. Phillips seemed to live a charmed life — backing singer to the stars with an incredible career here and across the Atlantic — but her smile masked a difficult childhood and the reality that she was adopted as a baby in the ’60s.…

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  • Songs of My Families: A Thirty-Seven-Year Odyssey from Korea to America and Back

    Songs of My Families: A Thirty-Seven-Year Odyssey from Korea to America and Back

    by Kelly Fern with Brad Fern

    In 1971, Lee Myonghi, aged five, was taken from her family and placed in a Korean orphanage. Six months later, she was flown to the United States, where she and two other Korean girls were adopted by a Minnesota couple. They renamed her Kelly Jean.…

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  • Split at the Root: A Memoir of Love and Lost Identity

    Split at the Root: A Memoir of Love and Lost Identity

    by Catana Tully

    In this memoir, the author explores questions of race, adoption, and identity, not as the professor of cultural studies she became, but as the Black child of German settlers in Guatemala. Her journey into the mystery that shrouded her early years begins in the US…

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  • Surrounding Sparky: A Gift of Life

    Surrounding Sparky: A Gift of Life

    by Brad Livingood

    The story of one man’s journey to unearth his roots while navigating the complexities of a 1950s adoption, told through the backdrop of American history, raising a young family, and the advent of social media and modern DNA testing. Serendipitous twists and turns are all…

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  • Survival Without Roots: Memoir of an Adopted Englishwoman (Book 1)

    Survival Without Roots: Memoir of an Adopted Englishwoman (Book 1)

    by Anna Anderson

    The Survival Without Roots memoir trilogy portrays the melting pot of emotions experienced by many adoptees associated with their lack of identity, as they spend a lifetime wondering … “Is there anyone out there who looks like me, talks like me and thinks like me?” As an…

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  • Surviving Secrets

    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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  • Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir

    Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir

    by Rebecca Carroll

    Rebecca Carroll grew up the only black person in her rural New Hampshire town. Adopted at birth by artistic parents who believed in peace, love, and zero population growth, her early childhood was loving and idyllic—and yet she couldn’t articulate the deep sense of isolation…

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  • Swabbed & Found: An Adopted Man’s DNA Journey to Discover his Family Tree

    Swabbed & Found: An Adopted Man’s DNA Journey to Discover his Family Tree

    by Frank Billingsley

    As Houston’s beloved KPRC weatherman for more than 20 years, Frank Billingsley seems like a relative to many people. His optimistic presence comes into their homes and reassures that even the gloomiest of rain clouds probably has a silver lining. He has such a way…

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  • Taken at Birth: Stolen Babies, Hidden Lies, and My Journey to Finding Home

    Taken at Birth: Stolen Babies, Hidden Lies, and My Journey to Finding Home

    by Jane Blasio

    From the 1940s through the 1960s, young pregnant women entered the front door of a clinic in a small North Georgia town. Sometimes their babies exited out the back, sold to northern couples who were desperate to hold a newborn in their arms. But these…

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  • Taking Down the Wall

    Taking Down the Wall

    by Christine Murphy

    To find a solution, a person must first admit there is a problem. Taking Down the Wall is a chronicle of one woman’s journey to the painful and reluctant admission that there is indeed a problem, her refusal to let an old wound heal. The…

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  • Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina

    Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina

    by Michaela DePrince with Elaine DePrince

    Michaela DePrince was known as girl Number 27 at the orphanage, where she was abandoned at a young age and tormented as a “devil child” for a skin condition that makes her skin appear spotted. But it was at the orphanage that Michaela would find…

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  • Tell No One

    Tell No One

    by Brendan Watkins

    A stunning memoir of one man’s search for his birth parents, which uncovered an astonishing global scandal at the heart of the Catholic Church.Brendan Watkins was eight years old when his parents told him he was adopted. When he was in his late twenties, he…

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  • Ten Thousand Sorrows

    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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  • 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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  • 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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  • That Mean Old Yesterday: A Memoir

    That Mean Old Yesterday: A Memoir

    by Stacey Patton

    An astonishing coming-of-age memoir by a young woman who survived the foster care system to become an award-winning journalist.  On a rainy night in November 1999, a shoeless Stacey Patton, promising student at NYU, approached her adoptive parents’ house with a gun in her hand.…

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