WilmU Book Club

May 2020  | Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

Date/Time:
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
12:30pm

Location:
Online through Zoom

Please join the WilmU Book Club for an online discussion on Dani Shapiro’s book, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love.

Students, Faculty, Alumni and Staff are all welcome! 
Registration not required. Use Zoom link above to join the conversation online.

Borrow the ebook or audiobook on Overdrive through your local library! More details here.

ABOUT THE BOOK 

What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?

In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history–the life she had lived–crumbled beneath her.

Inheritance is a book about secrets–secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman’s urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in–a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.