Class, Shame, and Identity in Memoirs about Difficult Same-Race Adoptions by Jeremy Harding and Lori Jakiela

Marianne Novy

doi:10.3390/genealogy2030024

Abstract

This paper will discuss two search memoirs with widely divergent results by British Jeremy Harding and American Lori Jakiela, in which the memoirists recount discoveries about their adoptive parents, as well as their birth parents. While in both cases the adoptions are same-race, both provide material for analysis of class and class mobility. Both searchers discover that the adoption, in more blatant ways than usual, was aimed at improving the parents’ lives—impressing a rich relative or distracting from the trauma of past sexual abuse—rather than benefiting the adoptee. They also discover the importance of various kinds of shame: for example, Harding discovers that his adoptive mother hid the close connection that she had had with his birthmother, because she was trying to rise in class. Jakiela imagines the humiliation her birthmother experienced as she tries to understand her resistance to reunion. Both memoirists recall much childhood conflict with their adoptive parents but speculate about how much of their personalities come from their influence. Both narrate changes in their attitudes about their adoption; neither one settles for a simple choice of either adoptive or birth identity. Contrasts in their memoirs relate especially to gender, nation, class, and attitudes to fictions.

Highlights

British and American TV shows regularly ask, “Who Do You Think You Are?” and answer in terms of heredity
Lives—impressing a rich relative or, at least in part, distracting from trauma. They find the importance of various kinds of shame: Harding learns that his adoptive mother broke off the close connection that she had had with his birthmother1, because she was trying to rise in class
Both of these memoirs turn away from the idea of finding identity in birth origin and toward something more complex—what John McLeod calls “adoptive being,” which treats “bio-genetic and adoptive modes of kinship as concomitant instances of ‘being with’” (McLeod 2015, p. 27). Strained as her relationships with her adoptive parents have often been, in the course of her memoir Jakiela realizes that her birth parents provide very little material through which to construct her identity

Summary

Introduction

British and American TV shows regularly ask, “Who Do You Think You Are?” and answer in terms of heredity. Lives—impressing a rich relative or, at least in part, distracting from trauma They find the importance of various kinds of shame: Harding learns that his adoptive mother broke off the close connection that she had had with his birthmother , because she was trying to rise in class. Jakiela imagines the humiliation her birthmother experienced as she tries to understand her resistance to reunion She discovers her adoptive father’s early sexual trauma and how this shaped his personality. The British birthmother is much less injured by her past than the American one Both writers, conjure images of their adoptive parents at their best as they find narrative closure. He breaks down this opposition by continuing, “Another . . . is the fact that a mother may feel something like love for her biological children throughout her life, whether they are insistently present or torn away from her by circumstance at an early stage.” Retrospectively, Margaret comes to exemplify this; close to the end, she becomes “my first mother, my last” (p. 177), while Jakiela’s birthmother does not

Ancestry Search Stories

Adoption and Identity

Gender and Nation

Fictions and Truth

Conclusion