MacDonald’s memoir is a story about finding your family and yourself

Marylee MacDonald has been writing for over 50 years—with a master’s degree in English and creative writing from San Francisco State University and a certificate in novel writing from Stanford University and as a career journalist. Her short stories have won the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction, the American Literary Review’s fiction prize, the Jeanne M. Leiby Memorial Chapbook award, and many others, as well as having been finalists for awards like the Bellwether Prize. But after writing fiction for so long, MacDonald didn’t think to write the story of her own life until her son asked her to. Well, he didn’t ask for a book, but when he wanted more details about the circumstances surrounding his birth and subsequent adoption, MacDonald began writing once again. 

The result, Surrender, is the story of MacDonald’s search for her biological family after being adopted as a baby as well as the search for the baby she gave up herself, a stage she sets in the opening lines:

When I was sixteen and not yet wise enough to know what it meant to have a child and lose him, I surrendered my firstborn son. He was adopted. For the years of his youth, he was my ghost child. On good days I imagined him biking to the library or knocking helmets in a Pop Warner game. On bad days I pictured him dying and in need of a bone marrow transplant. I had never held him, not even as a newborn, and I had only briefly seen his face. Two years after his birth, I married his father, and we had four more children, full siblings to my absent child. When he turned twenty-one, I searched for him.

Thus begins MacDonald’s quest to make sense of what happened to her, as a baby put up for adoption and as a young mother struggling to put back together the pieces of her heart after losing her son. Kirkus Reviews calls Surrender “a touching personal account of a journey to understanding and acceptance; informative and unsettling.”

MacDonald, who splits her time between Arizona and California, has now known her oldest son for longer than the period of time she didn’t know him—the years between his adoption and her finding him when he was 21. So when he asked her for more information about his birth, even after knowing her for so long and knowing what happened, MacDonald started to think through all those details again. Processing her complicated emotions and difficult memories through writing, she found she wanted to “turn it into art.” And in a sense, she’d already written reams of fiction about it. “I think I have themes that run through my fiction,” she says. “Themes of people being displaced and misplaced, a very real feeling I have on a personal level.”

When she sat down to write after taking many years away from her craft, she relished the chance to get away from a journalistic voice and write as herself as well as about herself. The first chapter she wrote of what would eventually become Surrender got published by the first magazine she showed it to, and that support gave MacDonald the nudge she needed to cater to her artistic writing. “My truth always seems to come out more in my writing than [in] my speaking,” she says.

Surrender gets extremely personal with MacDonald’s life, detailing everything from a tense couples therapy session to her time in a home for unwed mothers to MacDonald’s lingering trauma. One of MacDonald’s goals in writing this book was to share the trauma of being a pregnant teenager with no options and to bring attention to the immense importance of reproductive rights, especially for underprivileged and young girls.

She also wanted to talk about feeling the tension of being an adoptee being told to feel grateful. “I don’t know that the general public is aware of that going on inside the hearts of adoptees,” she says. “A child growing up with their birth parents isn’t told to feel grateful. I wanted to write about that; I wanted people to understand that.” MacDonald, also a foster parent twice, has been heartened to hear from readers who are adoptive parents and value her insight into what it’s like to be an adoptee.

But Surrender isn’t only for people who are specifically seeking out adoption stories. Rather, all sorts of readers can relate to MacDonald’s journey of finding her family and herself, and they will inevitably come away from reading it with a better understanding of what can go on in the minds and hearts of adoptees and birth parents, issues that most people don’t often think about. MacDonald discovered which parts of herself, like her passion and drive, came from genetics and also about the way she forced herself to be compliant and malleable in order to fit in.

These days, MacDonald is writing another short story collection, Clouded Waters, as well as another in a series of historical fiction, The Transit of Venus, about an artist in California in the 1760s, both of which will be available for readers this year. She has also started her own publishing company, Grand Canyon Press, that publishes six books a year for otherwriters. After working so hard to share her own story, MacDonald wants to help other authors do the same. “There’s an explosion of creativity right now,” she says. “It would be nice to produce six really high-quality books a year and give people the opportunity to hold their book in their hands.” Readers can find MacDonald’s previous books and her blog at her website.