Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro might have been tempting fate, said

in Publishers Weekly. Across the past two decades, the longtime New Yorker achieved guru status as a memoirist who wrote extensively about family secrets, her parents, and wrestling with a rich Orthodox Jewish heritage.

But then the sense of self she’d worked so hard to assemble was shredded. Two years ago, on a whim, she joined her husband in using mail-in DNA kits to learn more about their ancestries. Hers revealed that she was not 100 percent European Ashkenazi, as she’d long thought. Soon she realized that the man she’d known and loved as her father had not been her biological parent, and she could barely believe it. “Everything that I knew myself to be was that I’d come from my parents, from our ancestors,” she says. “It is rare at the age of 54 to have an entirely new narrative about oneself.”

There were more surprises to come, said

in The Wall Street Journal. In her new memoir, Inheritance, Shapiro writes about her parents’ struggle to conceive and the lawlessness of the circa-1962 fertility clinics they visited. She also identifies her biological father, learns that he’d been a medical student when she was conceived, and establishes a relationship with him. Because her parents both died years ago, she will never find out if they knew all along that they hadn’t conceived her together. But she now understands her lifelong interest in secrets. “When there is this kind of withheld story, the person from whom it’s being withheld grows up in the shadow of that story—and is formed by it without knowing what she’s being formed by.”