literary journalism

Dani Shapiro’s ‘Inheritance’

“One is always at home in one’s past”, wrote Nabokov in Speak, Memory. But what happens when the edifice of the past crumbles with one blow? In 2016, at the age of fifty-four, Dani Shapiro spat into a plastic vial for a DNA test – like many, for a lark. The results, which revealed that the man who had raised her was not her biological father, however, rocked the very foundations of her sense of self. Inheritance is the story of what followed that discovery. With her parents no longer alive to answer her questions, Shapiro sets out on a quest to find out not only who she is, but what her parents knew about the fertility treatment that led to her conception…

 

Read the full article online in The Times Literary Supplement.

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