”Hello, is Sarah Saffian there?” asks the voice on the other end of the line. ”My name is Hannah Morgan. I think I’m your birth mother.” So begins this powerful memoir by a young woman whose life changes dramatically when she receives a phone call from someone at once a stranger and her most intimate relation. Saffian’s riveting story of painful self-discovery and newfound joy is unique in its reversal of the usual adoption narrative: here, the biological parents seek out the adoptee. Weaving together letters, journal entries, memories and relections, Saffian tells of her adoption, her adoptive mother’s death six years later, and her upbringing in a loving family. She learns that her biological parents ended up marrying and having other children. She is thus faced with an entire family to whom she is genetically linked. Saffian’s boldly honest account reaches a moving climax with their reunion, three years after the first phone call. Along the way, it raises thorny questions: What is a family? Can we have more than one? What is the line between parental concern and intrusion? Is it hypocritical to be a pro-choice adoptee? How do nature and nurture work together to form a person’s identity? By turns earnest and playful, Ithica: A Daughter’s Memoir of Being Found is sure to touch readers everywhere who have grappled with who they are.Sarah Saffian is a former reporter for the New York Daily News and has also written for the Village Voice, Interview, Harper’s Bazaar, and Mirabella. She holds a B.A. from Brown University and an M.F.A. from Columbia University, and lives in her native New York City.
SARAH SAFFIAN (http://www.saffian.com) is an author, a journalist, and a teacher. Ithaka (hardcover: Basic Books, 1998; paperback: Dell, 1999), her critically-acclaimed memoir of being an adoptee who was found by her birth family--both parents and three full siblings--has become an adoption classic. The book was widely and favorably reviewed--by The New York Times Book Review, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, Slate, Salon, Glamour, Redbook, Francine Prose for Elle, and numerous other publications. Ithaka has been translated into Italian (Itaca, Corbaccio), and in 2006, it was published in a new edition with a current Afterword.
Sarah has worked as a Senior Editor for Entertainment Weekly, a Contributing Editor for Rosie, a Senior Writer for Us magazine, and a Staff Writer for The New York Daily News, and has contributed to publications including The New York Times, The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, Harper's Bazaar, Redbook, New York, Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, and Slate. Formerly a journalism professor in the undergraduate writing department at the New School, Sarah also teaches courses in memoir and narrative journalism each July at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, created an online course about identity through Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and offers writing coaching/editing/ghost writing services under the rubric The Vertical Pronoun.
A frequent media commentator, Sarah co-hosted with NPR's Ray Suarez a pilot for a PBS talk show about books, called Latest Word. She has been a writer-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Millay Colony for the Arts, and graduated with Honors in English and American Literature from Brown and received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia.
