Dani Shapiro: ‘Science will bring an end to these family secrets’
Take a look at your reflection. What do you see? Who do you think you are? When the writer Dani Shapiro was a little girl, she would sneak down the hall late at night once her parents were asleep, the better to stare at herself uninterrupted in the bathroom mirror. She felt, though she would not have been able to articulate this at the time, different – a creature apart. Perhaps if she gazed at herself for long enough, a new face would emerge from behind her own: a truer one, a face that would better reflect her sense of herself.
As she grew older, this otherness – a disconnect she carried with her all the time – grew more and more powerful. It was, she says, as though she was “trapped on the other side of an invisible wall, separate and cut off” – and yet, she had no idea why. In the New Jersey neighbourhood where she grew up, the only child in an Orthodox Jewish family, she would wander the streets with her poodle, hoping to be invited in by neighbours. She wonders now if she wasn’t looking for a new family. Did other people see her as different? Well, they were certainly struck by her appearance. Shapiro has white-blonde hair and blue eyes. One day in the late 1960s, a family friend, Mrs Kushner – the future grandmother of Jared, husband of Ivanka Trump – pulled her to one side. Mrs Kushner had lived in Poland during the war. “We could have used you in the ghetto, little blondie,” she said, gripping her arm. “You could have gotten us bread from the Nazis.”
Shapiro is the author of several bestselling memoirs, her stock-in-trade the public unpicking of life’s more complicated knots. “I’ve always tried to make meaning out of things that are difficult,” she says. “To attempt to order the chaos.”
But down the years (she’s in her 50s now), she’d also come to accept that there was a mystery at the centre of her life: something on which she couldn’t put her finger. In June 2016, however, the mystery was solved. Shapiro inadvertently made a discovery, at which point her otherness, and her blonde hair, suddenly made sense – though everything else she thought she knew now crumbled to dust.
“An air of unreality settled around me,” she writes in her new memoir,
Inheritance. “I was stupid, disbelieving. Nothing computed.” Who do you think you are? This was a question that she both could, and couldn’t, answer.
In 2016, Shapiro’s parents were no longer alive: her loving father, whom she adored; her difficult mother, to whom she was never close. That summer, her husband, Michael, curious about his origins, had sent away for one of the DNA-testing kits that are now the US’s most popular holiday gift (last year, 12m were sold; in total, some 26m people have taken a test, adding their DNA to the four leading commercial ancestry databases), and one night the two of them spat into two vials. Weeks later an email arrived, containing their results. She and Michael were puzzled by hers: according to the Ancestry website, her DNA was only 52% eastern European Ashkenazi, and the rest a smattering of French, Irish, English and German. But they were hardly concerned – until they decided to compare her results with those of her half-sister, Susie, at which point Michael grasped that the two women were not, in fact, related at all.
This could mean only one of two things: either Shapiro’s father was not Susie’s father, or he was not hers. In her gut, Shapiro knew immediately that he was Susie’s father. Susie looked like him, whereas she looked like no one in their family. But how could this be? Her dear dad, her soulmate. After this, things moved quickly. On Ancestry, a first cousin – one unfamiliar to Shapiro – was listed. It didn’t take much digging to discover that his mother had two surviving brothers, one of whom, a doctor, had been a medical student in Philadelphia, the city to which, Shapiro now remembered, her parents had once travelled for fertility treatment (her mother had mentioned this only twice to her daughter in her lifetime, and always in a way that brooked no discussion). Was it possible that this man – in her book, Shapiro calls him Ben Walden – had been a sperm donor back in the day, and his sperm “mixed” with that of her father? (Clinics, then unregulated, often used this practice to improve their results; patients were told to go home and think no more about it.) Yes, it was more than possible. Having found him online, she watched a video on his website in which he appeared before her: a man with her colouring, her jaw, her eyes, her voice and her hand gestures.
On my own computer screen – we talk via Skype; she is in a hotel room in New York, a stopping point on her US book tour – I see Shapiro smile. In the moment of her discovery, she felt traumatised and alone. Why had her parents gone to their graves carrying so huge a secret?
But she knows now that she really isn’t alone. “This is my 10th book,” she says. “And I’ve never experienced anything like it. On tour, every event has been wall to wall. It’s fascinating. I can almost pick them out now. In every audience, there is a significant number of people who have discovered family secrets of their own: adoptees who were never told; donor-conceived people who never knew; parents who made a decision not to disclose the truth to their children, but who now realise that is no longer viable; older men – not my usual kind of reader – who have been anonymous donors, and who have either already been contacted [by their biological children], or who believe there’s a good chance they might be.”
Shapiro believes that in the US there is currently “a kind of epidemic” in terms of the numbers of people who are learning the truth about their identity. “The kits are so popular. It is a bit of a national obsession. The statistic in the industry is that approximately 2% of people who take a DNA test discover an NPE – that is, to use the terminology, they are Not Parent Expected, or a Non Parental Event. If 12m kits were sold in the US last year, then around 240,000 people have discovered their parent is not their parent – and they’re only the ones who’ve taken a test.”
Her book, Shapiro thinks, speaks to this “epidemic”, the literature around donor insemination being surprisingly scant – and though Inheritance is a highly personal book, one that seeks to tell only her story, in the months since she finished writing it, she has grown ever more focused on what she regards as the long-ignored ethical issues involved in donor insemination.
“In my parents’ time, there was no regulation. I’ve spoken with many people who made the discovery they were donor-conceived, and then almost immediately found 27 half-siblings, 42 half-siblings. This is happening all the time. But even now, the situation is not much better.” In the UK, donors can no longer be anonymous (the law changed in 2005). But in the US and Canada, it’s still permitted.
“Many donors still tick the anonymity box. That needs to change, partly because of the consequences for their biological children – my book is instructive about what it’s like to discover you’re the child of an anonymous donor – but also because they will be found. There’s a basic misunderstanding about DNA testing. My [biological] father had not had a DNA test. But a nephew of his had and so I found him. Anonymity is over. We need to ask if the guarantee of anonymity made by sperm banks is still valid when the world has changed – and the science has changed.”
In recent weeks, Shapiro has spoken at the bio-ethics departments of both Harvard and Stanford universities. “This is complex. What is the moral responsibility of someone who once donated sperm? And what is the moral responsibility of someone who discovers they were conceived in that way to the donor? A few decades from now, people will say, ‘My God, I can’t believe it ever happened that way.’ Science is going to force us into a place where there can’t be these secrets. But right now, we’re dealing with a tidal wave.”
Shapiro is lucky.Her experience, after the initial shock, was positive. She wanted to meet her biological father and, after some hesitation, he agreed. They got on well and their relationship – a warm friendship – is ongoing. “He did the right thing,” she says. “He is a lovely human being and I recognise aspects of myself in him. But I’ve heard a lot of stories, and they’re not all good. If I’d found my biological father, and he was mean and had different politics from me and lived a life I didn’t recognise, that might have been different. Or if he had not wanted to meet me at all. That would also have been difficult.” Meeting Ben has helped her to feel, at last, “like a complete person”.
Nor did her discovery, ultimately, change her feelings for the man she grew up with. “I hated it when people said to me: ‘Your father’s still your father.’ But when people said: ‘He couldn’t have loved you more,’ I knew that was true. At first, it was hard to move past a sense of having been betrayed by my parents, but I’ve come to experience them as creatures of their time. This could not have been easy for them.” Their infertility, and the secret they shared, has shed new light on their relationship. “My father was certainly sad and beaten down – before he married my mother, he’d been divorced and widowed – and my mother did have a personality disorder. But what they went through to conceive me and what they then did to pack away the knowledge of it – that just poured gasoline over the whole thing. It had a great deal to do, I see now, with my father becoming a shadowy figure and with my mother’s rage and contempt for him.”
Shapiro was closer by far to her father, who was not biologically related to her, than to her mother, who never stopped reminding her daughter that it was to her that she owed her existence. “But if anything, I love him more than before. I talk to him more; I feel him around me more. This knowledge has led to an evolution of something I already felt: the sense that who we
love, and feel connected to, sometimes has to do with biology, and sometimes not. I’m less and less interested in the prescribed rules about these things. My parents created a myth. They worried what people would think, but there was also the fear that their child wouldn’t love them as much if she knew the truth – and I can’t imagine such a thing.”
This sense extends outwards, to other members of her family. The first time she saw her beloved aunt Shirley and her cousins on her father’s side after her secret was out, she felt closer to them than ever. “There was a truth between us,” she says. “This profound openness.”
And what of her Jewishness? We all make narratives of our lives: stories we’ve inherited, or told ourselves, and burnished down the years. If we have grown up in a particular community, it can be central to our sense of identity. In Inheritance, Shapiro describes all that her Judaism means to her: the Hebrew prayers that constantly play in her head; the portraits of her relatives that hang on the walls in her hall; above all, the strange shame she felt when people were apt to insist she did not look Jewish. “I had a much more complicated relationship with that than I acknowledged,” she says. “Not looking Jewish was somehow perceived as flattering, and that felt uncomfortable to me.”
Does she feel differently about this aspect of her identity now? Yes, but not in any of the ways you might expect. “After I finished the book, I was at a gala dinner in New York organised by a Jewish organisation,” she tells me. “And there, I caught a flash of myself in the mirror in the hotel ballroom, and saw myself the way other people see me for the first time. There is a secret unconscious language people have: it’s very human to notice the familiar – we do it whether we like it or not. I’d always been treated by my tribe as other, but now I understand why, and it’s liberating.” She hesitates – uncertain, perhaps, that I’ll understand. “What I mean is that I’m free to be as Jewish as I want to be.” Shapiro isn’t one for happy endings; she is not a person who ties things up with “neat bows”. But the rabbi who told her that her discovery was, pinching from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “a gauntlet with a gift in it” was right.
Inheritance is dedicated “to my father”. That she doesn’t say which one speaks volumes: those who like to insist that blood is always thicker than water should read her book, and let their own hearts slowly and gently expand.
Inheritance by Dani Shapiro is published by Daunt Books at £9.99. Buy it from guardianbookshop.com for £8.79
It was hard to move past a sense of having been betrayed by my parents