My colleagues at Georgetown University have heard about this book ad nauseam, and some of them have even had the dubious pleasure of reading parts of it in an earlier form. I’d like to thank my partner in crime, Carol Kent, along with good friends Norma Tilden, Jeffrey Hammond, Elizabeth Velez, George O’Brien, Rebecca Pope, Denise Brennan, Barbara Feinman Todd, and John Glavin, for their interest over the years. Other friends and family members have been steadfast in their enthusiasm for a book that sometimes seemed destined never to appear. Chief among them are my oldest and dearest friend (and fellow St. Raphael’s alum), Mary Ellen Maher-Harkins, as well as Jessica Blake Hawke, Belle Yeselson, Joan and Stan Levin, Maureen McDonough, Christine Hughes, Sarah Hughes, Connie Casey, Elizabeth Judd, Lori Milstein, and David Sahr.
My mother, Jean Corrigan, always has been supportive of this book and my writing—even though books are not her passion. As a mother, she’s been an inspiration to me, and she’s the most loving grandmother any child could wish for. And my daughter, Molly Yeselson, is, quite simply, the greatest kid in the world and the greatest joy in my life.
Finally, my intrepid husband, Richard Yeselson, read every page of this manuscript at least three times. We are still married. Those two seemingly incompatible facts testify to his intellectual rigor, his loving and active involvement in my work, and his terrific sense of humor.
Recommended Reading
One of the pleasures of writing this book has been spending time rereading and thinking about books that I love. Unlike when I was working on my doctoral dissertation, or editing the essays that compose Mystery & Suspense Writers, I felt little responsibility here to discuss books or authors I don’t like. What follows, then, is a highly subjective list of old and new favorite books. I’ve talked about many of them in the preceding pages; some have occurred to me as I’ve been assembling this list.
Female Extreme-Adventure Tales:
Traditional and Feminist
Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion by Jane Austen
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
Jane Eyre and Villette by Charlotte Brontë
Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
One True Thing and Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen
Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman
Collected Poems by Stevie Smith
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Catholic Secular-Martyr Tales
Karen and With Love from Karen by Marie Killilea
The Night They Burned the Mountain by Dr. Tom Dooley
Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
Final Payments by Mary Gordon
The Beany Malone series by Lenora Mattingly Weber
Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen
Books About China, Adoption, and
Parenthood in General
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year by Anne Lamott
The Lost Daughters of China: Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America, and the Search for a Missing Past by Karin Evans
Wuhu Diary: On Taking My Adopted Daughter Back to Her Hometown in China by Emily Prager
The Exact Same Moon: Fifty Acres and a Family by Jeanne Marie Laskas
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
Little Miss Spider by David Kirk (juvenile)
A Mother for Choco by Keiko Kasza (juvenile)
Happy Adoption Day! by John McCutcheon (juvenile)
Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child by Michael Bérubé
Mystery and Suspense Novels
Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers
A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine
Time and Again by Jack Finney
The Inspector Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell The Derek Strange series by George P. Pelecanos An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P. D. James Bucket Nut by Liza Cody Early Autumn by Robert B. Parker Death Trick by Richard Stevenson The V. I. Warshawski series by Sara Paretsky Fall from Grace by Larry Collins The Detective Inspector John Rebus series by Ian Rankin The Mario Balzic series by K. C. Constantine
The Inspector Chen Cao series by Qiu Xiaolong
The Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
Academic Farces (besides the unparalleled Lucky Jim,
enshrined under the category “Books I Never
Get Tired of Rereading”)
Straight Man by Richard Russo
Publish and Perish and The Lecturer’s Tale by James Hynes
Small World: An Academic Romance by David Lodge
Literary Criticism That a Nonacademic
Audience Can Enjoy
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
The Girl Sleuth: On the Trail of Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton, and Cherry Ames by Bobbie Ann Mason
Writing a Woman’s Life by Carolyn Heilbrun
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose
Fiction and Nonfiction That Make a
Reader Believe in Possibility
The collected novels, short stories, and essays of Laurie Colwin
The All of It and Matters of Chance by Jeannette Haien
Almost anything by M.F.K. Fisher
News from Nowhere, or An Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance by William Morris
Books I Never Get Tired of Rereading
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym
Pride and Prejudice and Emma by Jane Austen
Shining Through by Susan Isaacs
David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston
Biography and Autobiography
Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of Growing Up Poor and Black in the Rural South by Anne Moody
Eleanor Roosevelt, Vols. 1 and 2, by Blanche Wiesen Cook
Black Boy (American Hunger) by Richard Wright
Patrimony: A True Story by Philip Roth (plus everything else by him!)
Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood by Kate Simon
Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me with Apples by Ruth Reichl
An Orphan in History: One Man’s Triumphant Search for His Jewish Roots by Paul Cowan
Bad Blood: A Memoir by Lorna Sage
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez by Richard Rodriguez
Teacher: The One Who Made the Di ference by Mark Edmundson
A Drinking Life: A Memoir by Pete Hamill
Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin
Manhattan, When I Was Young by Mary Cantwell
Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir by Joyce Johnson
Stu fed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family by Patricia Volk
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
Faith, Sex, Mystery by Richard Gilman
The Gatekeeper: A Memoir by Terry Eagleton
The Little Locksmith: A Memoir by Katharine Butler Hathaway
Miscellaneous Fiction and Nonfiction
Dispatches by Michael Herr
Work: A Story of Experience by Louisa May Alcott
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction by Linda Gordon
Looking for a Ship by John McPhee
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
Endless Love by Scott Spencer
Cathedral by Raymond Carver
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music
by Greil Marcus
Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s by Ann Douglas
Here Is New York by E. B. White
They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 by David Maraniss
Mason’s Retreat by Christopher Tilghman
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves by Adam Hochschild
Notes
Introduction
Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time in Three (1976; reprint, Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 612.
Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger) (reprint, New York: Library of America, 1991), 237–38.
Chapter 1
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989), 160.
Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3.
Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853; reprint, London: Penguin Classics, 1979), 97.
Ibid.
The disaster that, in fact, eventually befell Jane and Cassandra Austen and their mother in the last years of Jane’s life. A lot of qualifications must be appended to this thumbnail description of the marriage market as an extreme adventure particularly for nineteenth-century women. I’m ignoring the (in many respects) more dire situation of working-class women—just as most nineteenth-century literature ignored it, because the novels and poems that described this particular adventure were, after all, written by literate middle- and upper-class women. I also don’t mean to imply that marriage itself was such a great deliverance. Arguably, in legal terms, it made a woman even more of a dependent by depriving her of her property rights, rights to her own body, privacy, and custody of her children should a separation occur. These objections noted, since marriage was considered by nineteenth-century society as the “natural conclusion” to a young woman’s story, not to be chosen in marriage was regarded as a tragic personal misfortune. Think of what being left at the altar did to Dickens’s Miss Havisham.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 162.
Ibid., 88.
Ibid.
Ibid., 234.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847; reprint, New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1971), 6.
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 14.
Ibid., 60.
Ibid., 73.
Ibid., 93.
Ibid., 269.
Ibid., 290.
Ibid., 322.
Brontë, Villette, 226.
Ibid., 229.
Ibid.
Ibid., 231.
Ibid., 232.
Ibid., 231.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 232.
Ibid.
Ibid., 235.
Ibid., 235–36.
Ibid., 236.
Ibid., 596. Actually, Brontë’s contemporaries found the ending more cryptic than we do. Lucy’s failure to actually pronounce Paul Emanuel lost at sea prompted a few of her female literary correspondents to write to her asking for clarification.
Ibid., 237.
Ibid.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 274.
Karin Evans’s The Lost Daughters of China and Emily Prager’s Wuhu Diary—both excellent personal accounts about adopting from China and, in Prager’s case, returning to China with her five-year-old daughter—weren’t published yet in 1999. Neither was The Exact Same Moon: Fifty Acres and a Family, Washington Post Magazine columnist Jeanne Marie Laskas’s affecting collection of columns about her experiences as the mother of two daughters adopted from China. A flight attendant on the endless “Northworst” flight home from China recommended Wild Swans by Jung Chang, praising it as a great memoir about three generations of Chinese women that gives readers a sense of the turmoil of twentieth-century China. She was right. As far as children’s adoption books go, Molly is, so far, pretty uninterested in all of them, although she likes to look at the photos in Emily Prager’s book. I like the illustrations in I Love You Like Crazy Cakes, the bestselling children’s book by Rose Lewis about a single mom adopting her daughter from China, but her story isn’t like my story, so I find myself “correcting” her text as I read. I like Happy Adoption Day! by John McCutcheon and Little Miss Spider by David Kirk, which is a spine-tingling tale about adoption (Betty the Beetle rescues Little Miss Spider from the jaws of some hungry birds). But my favorite kids’ adoption book—the one that always makes me tear up—is A Mother for Choco by Keiko Kasza (Choco the bird is adopted by Mrs. Bear, who’s already a mother to an alligator, a pig, and a hippo). Choco addresses, with humor and poignancy, the issue of adoptive parents and children not looking alike—an issue that, obviously, already comes up a lot in my mixed-race family’s life.
Nell Freudenberger, Lucky Girls (New York: Ecco, 2004), 14.
Paul Cowan, An Orphan in History: One Man’s Triumphant Search for His Jewish Roots (New York: Doubleday, 1982), 3.
Chapter 2
Vartan Gregorian, The Road to Home: My Life and Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 257.
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (London: Penguin, 1954), 61.
Ibid., 14–15.
Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (New York: Dutton, 1975), 125.
Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1929; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1970), 3.
John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 178.
William Morris, News from Nowhere, or An Epoch of Rest: Being some chapters from a Utopian Romance, in Commonweal, 10 January– 4 October 1890 (reprint, London: Penguin, 1993), 228.
“The Gutting of Couffignal,” in The Big Knockover, ed. Lillian Hellman (New York: Vintage, 1972), 34.
One of my favorite, characteristically on-target phrases from Ross Macdonald—this one from Black Money (1965; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1996), 88.
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1988), 79.
Sue Grafton, P is for Peril (New York: Putnam, 2001), 175.
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 63.
Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1913; reprint, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962), 434.
Village Voice Literary Supplement, April 1991, 19–21.
Chapter 3
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 176.
Barbara Pym, Some Tame Gazelle (1950; reprint, New York: Perennial, 1984), 169.
Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night (1936; reprint, New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1995), 2.
Ibid., 5.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 17–18.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957), 54.
Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 255.
Allen Ginsberg, “America.” ll. 73–74. In Allen Ginsberg Collected Poems, 1947–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 146.
Chaper 4
Terry Eagleton, The Gatekeeper: A Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 104.
Rev. Brother Eugene, O.S.F., ed., The Brooklyn Catholic Speller: Fifth Year (New York: W. H. Sadler, 1939), 58.
Ibid., 48.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 68.
Ibid., 80.
For a great modern autobiography about wrestling with God, I recommend Richard Gilman’s 1986 memoir, Faith, Sex, Mystery. Gilman, a theater critic and professor of drama at Yale, had a conversion experience one summer’s day in 1952 while he was browsing in a branch of the New York Public Library. There, in the dusty stacks, he was inexplicably drawn to a large tome, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, by French philosopher Étienne Gilson. Reading the book started Gilman on the path to becoming a
Catholic—a faith he eventually renounced.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1854; reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969), 470.
Although its worldview is secular and its range historical as well as autobiographical, Life as We Know It, Michael Bérubé’s 1996 book about Down syndrome—which his second child was diagnosed with at birth—is an excellent and enlightening modern “inheritor” to the Karen books.
Marie Killilea, Karen (1952; reprint, Cutchogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer Books, n.d.), 43.
Ibid., 45–46.
Ibid., 249–50.
Marie Killilea, With Love from Karen (1963; reprint, Cutchogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer Books, n.d.), 9.
Killilea, Karen, 42.
Ibid., 46.
Ibid., 47.
Ibid., 75.
Ibid., 236.
Killilea, With Love, 176.
Ibid., 225.
Ibid., 276.
Killilea, Karen, 41.
Killilea, With Love, xx.
James T. Fisher, Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927–1961: Culture, Politics, and the Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
Dr. Thomas Dooley, The Night They Burned the Mountain in Dr. Tom Dooley’s Three Great Books, 1956–60 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962), 261.
Ibid., 334.
Ibid., 366.
James Monahan, Before I Sleep . . . The Last Days of Dr. Tom Dooley (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), 10.
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