True blood

A little more than a year ago, one of my closest friends learned through a genealogy website’s DNA test that the father who raised her was not her biological father. I’ve watched her navigate the flurry of shock and wonder, confusion and relief, that has come with this revelation, a discombobulation that Dani Shapiro unpacks in her gripping new book, “Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love,” written after she, too, received DNA results that shook her to the core.

Shapiro grew up in a prominent observant Jewish family, a family and faith she has mined deeply in her earlier memoirs and novels. The ancestors on her father’s side of the family, who fled Eastern Europe and became leaders of modern Orthodoxy, “are the foundation upon which I have built my life,” she writes. “I have dreamt of them, wrestled with them, longed for them. I have tried to understand them. In my writing, they have been my territory — my obsession, you might even say.”

When she learns she shares no biological connection with these ancestors who’ve shaped her inner world, she enters a state of free fall.

As grounded as she had been in her family, however, Shapiro has always been a seeker. She would spend hours in front of the mirror as a young girl. “I was looking for something I couldn’t possibly have articulated,” she writes, “but I always knew it when I saw it. … A truer face just beneath my own.”

Shapiro didn’t look like her parents — she is blond, blueeyed, so gentile looking she A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love was featured in a Kodak Christmas ad when she was 3 years old. She grew up bombarded with questions like You sure you’re Jewish? There’s no way you’re Jewish. Did your mother have an affair with the Swedish milkman?

While the DNA results profoundly destabilize Shapiro, they also confirm the “otherness” she had always felt, and launch her on a journey that takes her both inward, toward an interrogation of self, and outward, investigating her own story as a detective would.

The resulting book is as compulsively readable as a mystery novel, while exploring the deeper mysteries of identity and family and truth itself. Shapiro reaches out to many guides along the way — rabbis, genealogy experts, family members and friends, classic books, meditation teachers and others — who help her piece together a new narrative, a new scaffolding to hold her life.

I see my friend rebuilding her own mythology now, too, my friend whose experience is a cultural inverse of Shapiro’s. The DNA results showed that my friend is half Ashkenazi; the family of the father who raised her was involved with the KKK, and she’s found it healing to chop that legacy of hate from her family tree and claim her Jewish heritage. I can’t wait for her to read Shapiro’s book.

“Inheritance” is not just for those reeling from similar discoveries, however; the book will speak to anyone interested in identity, in family, in a story told with great insight and honesty and heart.

“This was the challenge that had been set down at my feet,” Shapiro writes. “How shall I live?” “Inheritance” encourages us to ask the same of ourselves, to welcome our own contradictions, to learn to live with less certainty. “My newfound awareness was both gauntlet and gift,” she writes. “The choice wasn’t to see it as one or the other. It was to embrace it as both.”

Gayle Brandeis is the author, most recently, of “The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide.” Email: books @sfchronicle.com