THE GIRL WITH THREE BIRTHDAYS

Eddington, a journalist and dance instructor, offers a memoir of being an adoptee.

In her debut, the author presents a highly readable personal account that’s full of twists and turns. The book initially alternates between Eddington’s childhood in Morrice, Michigan, and the adulthood it shaped, beginning with conflicting accounts of how and why her birth mother put her up for adoption. The author also addresses her own parental choices, including her decision to have a single child. The book’s second half focuses on her discovery of her birth family with the help of genetic testing and divulges other secrets about her background, which led her to find multiple relatives, living and dead, including full siblings; she also discovered her birth name, Mary Ann Lopez, and a birthdate that was roughly a month earlier than two other birthdays she’d celebrated as a child. This same section notes her discovery of her Mexican heritage, and her speculations on how her background may or may not have affected her white adoptive parents’ feelings toward her. Eddington’s book starts somewhat slowly and gets a bit bogged down in details of her early years, although it quickly picks up and becomes a consistently engaging read. In some ways, the memoir is typical of many adoptee stories, as in Eddington’s conclusion that people’s true parents are the ones who raised them. But it’s also a bracingly honest look at the author’s feelings about the birth family she discovered; Eddington highlights the initial uncertainty of her adoption due to her adoptive mother’s health crisis. The adoption narrative is closely interwoven with a more general personal memoir of growing up in Morrice, and it works best as a story of a woman connecting with her origins and discovering who she really is.

A personal work that effectively addresses issues surrounding adoption in America.