Why I Took My Books Off the Market

My mom died December 9, 2011.

My dad died November 15, 2023.

My brother Sam died March 18, 2026.

My brother John/Jyre died April 21, 2026.

My birth mother died November 30, 2010.

In You Don’t Look Adopted, I had a lot to say about all of theoe people. In many ways, I was having an Annetrum as I wrote. I was expressing both long-held and freshly-realized grievences. I was also talking about my life as authentically as I knew how. I was coming out of the fog in black and white. All my life, I began, I have felt both real and not real. I felt desperate to get my story out because the way I had been living was no longer working. I was twice divorced, in debt, and foundationally lost. I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted beyond getting my story out.

A couple of days after my mom died, I managed to drive into the Whole Foods parking lot at such a sharp angle and so quickly I felt as if I were on two tires for a moment. I saw my doctor later that day, and he prescribed anti-depressants, but I didn’t take them. I wasn’t depressed. I was gobsmacked with grief, panicked; I was moving fast and I was frozen at the same time. It was how I’d felt for much of my life, turned up high. All my circuits were weakening. I needed a long, tight hug more than I needed a prescription. A month-long hug might have helped stabalize me, or at least kept me from doing costly coping mechanisms such as attaching to destabalizing men, spending money excessively, and worrying as if that would change things. To feel someone’s heart beat against my body without having to do any kind of transaction—just to feel my feelings while held by another would have been a god-sent prescription. Or maybe it could have been a nine-month hug and I could have called it a re-creation and as we disentangled, a re-birth.

I digress.

 As I wrote, I imagined myself in front of a judge, placing argument after argument in front of them, trying to prove that adoption had affected my life in ways people did not admit, talk about, or believe. I had not been a blank slate when my parents got me at ten weeks old, I was arguing. I was a creature with a past who was bereft and not entirely herself in this box called adoptee.

These days, when people say to me, “I’m reading your book,” I don’t get an expansive feeling of yes. I usually stop breathing for a few beats. You think you know me, I think. I wrote that book, I think, but that’s not me. It’s stories I told. I’m standing here in front of you. I feel confused and not in control. Maybe I don’t want strangers to read my story. Maybe I want to pick who I tell it to.

I am proud I wrote that book. I have met hundreds and hundreds of marvelous people I probably would not have met if I hadn’t put that book out into the world. I lost friends because I put that book out into the world, but you and I both know that meant they probably weren’t really friends. The process of writing were three of the best months of my life. I had adventures. I spent the time in both New York City and Martha’s Vineyard, two of my most favorite places in the world. My license said I lived in California, but I’d packed up my things and moved out of my apartment in order to finally write this thing I’d been pecking at for thirty years, so my home had become my skin.

I haven’t read You Don’t Look Adopted in many years, so I don’t remember everything I said, but I do know I was judgmental and felt free to say what I thought about people. It was me stepping into my voice. I’m not criticizing myself. I’m duly noting. I wrote it as someone who was finding herself. But I’m not her anymore. She is in me, and I love her, and I have different things I want to do with my voice these days.

I want to use it to focus on and celebrate life force energy more than I want to hash out past events, for example.

One reason I didn’t try hard to get an agent and a publisher back then was because I wanted control of my work. If I ever wanted to change or pull what I wrote, I wanted to be able to do it easily, freely.

About seven years later, I wrote To Be Real as an experiment in just how me could I be while writing. I wanted to play with how little I could care about being good, a good person, a good daughter, a good adoptee, a good writer, how little I could care about having concise sentences, error-free writing. I wanted to see what it would feel like to let myself just say what I wanted to say without listening to the voices in my head that told me what I should say.

 My dad was dying at the time, so in many ways I was writing while on two wheels. I feel proud of the part of the book that has essays from writers who took my class, but the rest of the book I wish I’d kept as a draft and waited until I was clearer in my intentions before publishing it. I can let myself be sloppy, and I can tell other people’s secrets, but does it help me and others to make these things public?

Last week, my gut told me no.

I had this feeling of wanting to protect my childhood, my family, my life. I had a new need for privacy. I had a new need for an open field in which I could stand and freely love whomever my body loved without needing to step into my mind and criticize what I could not control.

What I do for work primarily is to help adopted people develop and hear their authentic voice. Their voice. They can write a book with it, if they want. They can talk to friends with it, talk to family members, whisper secrets to parts of themselves as they fall to sleep at night. Choice is a wonderful doorway to the infinite.

I’m glad I told my story.

I’m glad it’s mine.

I used to need to define what was between us, all those people I listed in the beginning. Now they are gone, I feel like I need to clear the throat of my heart so I can hold them cleanly, without bitterness, with awe, and thanks. I want to grow into that person, one marked by awe and gratitude. One who startles at the aliveness of people, things, ideas, and dreams.

So I’m clearing the slate. (Everyone knows this is just an idea—you can’t really clear any slate. No matter how hard you scrub, the history remains. You Don’t Look Adopted happened. It’s real.)

(I have left the Audible version of You Don’t Look Adopted up because I would give almost anything to have recordings of my mom and my birth mom reading anything, even the phone book, just so I could swim in their voice for a spell. I don’t know if my daughter will want the same from me after I am gone, but it will be there if she does.)

(I also took Truth and Agency, Writing Ideas for Adopted People off the market because, for now, I want to hold my teachings a little more closely to my heart. I will share them in relationship, not so freely on the page.)