The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts [Hardcover]

Catherine McKinely (Author), Catherine E. McKinley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 8, 2002

Suffused with longing, this rueful, passionate memoir about an adopted woman's search for her birth parents explores themes of race and family. Catherine McKinley was one of only a few thousand African American and bi-racial children adopted by white couples in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Raised in a small, white New England town, she had a persistent longing for the more diverse community that would better understand and encompass her. In an era shaped by the rhetoric of Black Power and Black Pride, McKinley's coming of age entailed her own detailed investigation into her birth history, a search complicated by the terms of a closed adoption that denied her all knowledge of the circumstances of her birth. The Book of Sarahs traces McKinley's own time of revelations: after a five-year period marked by dead ends and disappointments, she finds her birth mother and a half-sister named Sarah, the name that was originally given to her. When she locates her birth father and meets several of his eleven other children she begins to see the whole mosaic of her parentage-African American, WASP, Jewish, Native American-and then is confronted with a final revelation that threatens to destabilize all she has uncovered. At the center of the narrative is McKinley's angry passion for her two mothers and her quest for self-acceptance in a world in which she seems to herself to be always outside the bounds of social legitimacy. In telling of her struggles both to fit into and to defy social conventions, McKinley challenges us to rethink our own preconceptions about race, identity, kinship, loyalty, and love.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

McKinley grew up a biracial adopted child in a politically progressive family, living in a mostly white community in a working-class Massachusetts town. After discovering that her birth mother is a white Jewish woman and her father African-American and part Native American, McKinley finds that she may even have a sister, possibly a twin, by these same parents. But McKinley's first burst of happiness at finding her birth parents is continually punctured: her mother relates to her mostly through the young daughter of her current relationship and has serious emotional problems. (The title refers to the fact that Sarah was the name her birth mother gave McKinley, as well as McKinley's older sister and her half-sister. So there are three Sarahs: all related, all from the same mother.) McKinley frets that her newfound family will disapprove of her lesbianism. By the end of her journey, she is left with feeling "post-family": "I had been born into a loss. People were lost to me." McKinley wants a clear-cut racial, biological and family identity, but comes to the difficult conclusion that such a thing does not exist for her or anyone else if they begin looking hard enough. McKinley writes beautifully in this debut memoir, never resorting to sentimentality or easy emotions within this tangled web of emotional and family secrets.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In recounting her long and arduous journey in search of her birth parents, McKinley (Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing) draws us into a page-turning treasure hunt. Along the way she skillfully describes her upbringing as a black (or so she believed) child adopted by a white family during the 1960s, her tenacious efforts to winnow information out of the bureaucratic agency that handled her adoption and her often startlingly candid reactions to each new revelation about her background. Ultimately, she discovered that her parentage includes African American, WASP, Jewish, and Native American forbears. The multiple Sarahs of the title are just another confounding bit of information in this painful, funny, and very human memoir about race and family. In the end, the treasure McKinley seems to have discovered is her own independent self. Recommended for all libraries. Ellen D. Gilbert, Princeton, NJ
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint Press (October 8, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582432597
• ISBN-13: 978-1582432595
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,558,822 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Eye-opening, January 8, 2004

By 

Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts (Hardcover)

This book tells the tale of Catherine McKinley's search for her birth parents. McKinley, who is biracial, was adopted at birth. Brought up in a White family, she found herself drawn towards African American culture in her search for building her own identity. As an adult, questions about who she was and how she came to be gradually took over the focus of her life. In this book, she details how she searched for her birth parents and eventually found them, as well as other family members.

From reading the blurb on the back cover of the book, I had expected the book to focus more on McKinley's experiences of growing up as an adopted biracial child. I have very little experience myself with issues relating to adoption, and I had no idea how consuming the questions of identity and family can be for an adopted child. Prospective adoptive parents might learn quite a bit from this book about how adopted children may have an unquenchable thirst for knowing their birth parents, a thirst that can taint relationships between them and their adopted family members if not handled appropriately. Adoptees, on the other hand, may be quite interested to read how McKinley proceeded in her search, and how the results of her search compared with her dreams. The emotional issues concerning adoption are never easy to reconcile; after all, every adoption starts with a tragedy that has resulted in parents having to give up their children. The children and all of their parents, both adopted and birth, must spend the remainder of their lives putting the pieces back together.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Searching for Reality, January 7, 2005

By 

Susan McIntyre "Susan McIntyre" (Iowa) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts (Hardcover)

Catherine went searching for the truth and she found it. It was reality and not a made up story with a happy ending. I believe that she was very self serving in telling the story. I felt she did not really appreciate the parents who raised her, until the very end. I wondered how they felt after reading this book. She certainly laid out all her complaints about them. I personally could relate to her mother, who was doing the very best she could for a rather unappreciative daughter.

On the other hand, I think I gained some insight to what it was like to grow up black in a white world, not easy at all. I'm glad she was able to tell this story with as much depth and clarity as she did.

This story also brings to light the plight of the children of a middle class woman who had several children and didn't choose to acknowledge or care for them. What about birth control? Yes, she was mentally ill, but I wonder if we can excuse her for that.

In the last several years I have done the research that reunited my husband (in his 60's) with the birth mother who gave him up. The search was very interesting and it was a miracle how it all came together. The story has a bittersweet ending, since his birth mother passed away within a year of their reunion.

This is a great story and I couldn't put it down.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Honest, Candid Memoir, July 7, 2003

By 

Linda (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts (Hardcover)

I beg to differ with some of the other customer reviews posted for The Book of Sarahs. Reality is messy. Members of the adoption triad--birthparents, adoptees, and adoptive parents--share a complicated, emotionally charged relationship from the moment the adoptee is born. There are one thousand and one reasons why birthmothers feel that relinquishment is the best possible choice for their child; there are just as many reasons why adoptive parents choose to raise a non-biological child. But the adoptee has the most to gain or lose. In my twenty-six years as a birthmother, I am continually amazed by the infinite variety of paths triad members have traveled, yet we're all connected by the same feelings of uncertainty, wistfulness, and longing for what might have been. Thankfully, adoption today is much more open, kinder, gentler; many studies have documented the impact of adoption on all triad members, and there are fewer black holes than there were a generation or more ago. Catherine McKinley's personal story of life as an adopted Black child raised in a white family and predominately white community will captivate readers. One does not have to a member of the adoption community to appreciate her search for self. Ms. McKinley's prose is a pleasure to read, a beautifully, richly written story of relationships that readers will find hard to put down.