TWICE A DAUGHTER

In this debut memoir, a woman’s hunt for her birthparents becomes a search for herself.

McGue and her twin sister, Jenny, were adopted as infants. Because it was a closed adoption, they never knew the identities of their birthparents—or their family health histories. When, at age 48, Julie thought she might have breast cancer, the author decided it would be best for her and her children to know what hereditary diseases existed in her family. She got Jenny on board with the search, though McGue worried about offending her adoptive parents. It turned out reassuring her family was the easy part: The hard part was all the secrecy surrounding the adoption. She knew her birth name—Ann Marie Jensen—and that she was adopted through St. Vincent’s Orphanage. Beyond that, the trail went cold. The author’s attempts to track down the “Jensens,” whomever they might be, ended up spanning eight years and involving all manner of obstacles, agencies, and investigators. It was never fully about health records, as McGue admitted to herself: “The desire for medical information involves not just locating my birth parents but also communicating with them, and that realization has led to fantasies about meeting and getting to know them.” What began as a pursuit of genetic information soon became an exploration into the core of the author’s identity. McGue writes in an urgent, fluid prose that captures the highs and lows of her expectations and disappointments. Here, she and her sister meet with Ray the “History Cop”: “Perhaps the negative karma I imagined did follow Jenny and me in from the parking lot, because when we lay out our search history, Ray shakes his head. He can’t help us. Our birth mother’s alias is the problem. We need her real name to proceed.” While not precisely a page-turner, the mystery is a relatable and compelling one, and readers will enjoy learning about the Byzantine mechanisms that underlie the adoption process. McGue and her family are sympathetic and well rendered, and readers will ultimately be as anxious as the author to find out who is waiting at the end of the search.

An engaging, endearing chronicle of a woman’s quest to find her origins.