Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter (Paperback)

by Betty Jean Lifton (Author) "I said, "Who am I?..." (more)
Key Phrases: adult adoptees, wedding certificate, New York, Madame Sawada, Bernard Mitvak (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"A personal account of the painful problems caused by the adopted child's aloneness among his or her contemporaries and the need (often supressed) to know of, even to find, the biological parents." --The New York Times Book Review

"Deeply stirring...important and enriching." --Elie Wiesel

"Twice Born is an eloquant book." --Psychology Today
-- Review

Review

"A personal account of the painful problems caused by the adopted child's aloneness among his or her contemporaries and the need (often supressed) to know of, even to find, the biological parents." --The New York Times Book Review

"Deeply stirring...important and enriching." --Elie Wiesel

"Twice Born is an eloquant book." --Psychology Today

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (April 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312187661
• ISBN-13: 978-0312187668
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,035,683 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent writing in an adoptee's view of adoption, June 3, 1999

By A Customer

One thing's for sure: BJ Lifton can write. And she understands adoption intimately. This book really tells it like it is, from relinquishment to long after the reunion. As a birthmother, I found "Twice Born" an extremely valuable look into the mind of the adopted person.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A powerful memoir that should not be generalized, September 10, 2003

By	Gisela Gasper Fitzgerald (USA) - See all my reviews

This is a truly moving book with poignant descriptions of Lifton's suffering as a child. She was adopted at age 2-1/2, told of her adoption at age 7 and warned by her harsh and controlling adoptive mother never to tell anyone, especially her father, that she knew the secret. Lifton grew up with the poisonous idea that an adopted child is the product of an "evil deed that hangs over most adoptions." The little girl was told that her natural parents were dead, which was a lie. It is easy to see how the adult author of Twice Born came to the view that a person is "fragmented" as long as she lacks a link with biological kin, that an adoptee is forced out of the natural flow of generational continuity, as others know it, and feels as if having been forced out of nature itself. Seen in these terms, adoptees become impotent creatures who have been denied free will. I am very moved by the story but want to say that this is the voice of one adoptee whose experience we should take careful note of but at the same time refrain from universalizing. Not all adoptees are raised by such harsh and emotionally vacant parents and also never had adopted friends with whom to discuss things. I am an adoptive mother of a daughter whom we adopted at age 4 days and who grew up into a contented, strong-willed and self-reliant young lady. Of course, we told her of her adoption, but she was not interested in searching for her natural parents. Unlike Lifton who as a toddler had experienced separation, loss, grief, mourning...going from mother to Infant's Home to Foster Home to Adoptive Home, our daughter and the other adoptees in our neighborhood were spared such miseries. Luckily, our birthmother looked for us and today we have a wonderful relationship with her and her family. Our daughter, however, does not feel she changed since meeting her birthmother, or that she became "whole" as if she had been fragmented before. Several of her neighborhood adoptee friends are also not interested in searching and consider themselves well-adjusted adults and parents. I wonder whether Lifton would have become a happy adoptee if she had been raised by loving and honest adoptive parents. Unhappily, when she found her natural mother and the link with biological kin was made, she discovered that now she "had two mothers instead of one, but since both had disappointed me, I had none." Yes, the bitter search for one's roots may take one to an empty place. It seems that the impulse of the adoptee to find the original mother, an urge traceable through the ages, exists as a force independent of the desired object, and continues even when the object has been found. Gisela Gasper Fitzgerald, author of ADOPTION: An Open, Semi-Open or Closed Practice?

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enlightening, April 29, 2007

By	Alyssa A. Lappen (Earth) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter (Paperback)

In this wonderful volume, BJ Lifton conquers the ghost territory known only to members of the adoption triad--adopted children, birth parents and adoptive parents.

That is to say, each member of the triad traverses the adoption journey haunted, as it were, by spirits of "would have's" "could have's" and "should have's"---those beings they imagine they could have had, or been--- if only their birth parents had raised them, if only they had not forsaken their birth children, if only they could have born biological children themselves.

At the time this book was first published, in 1973, this topic was still quite taboo. Adoptive children were supposed to be grateful for the new lives they had been given and never to look back, just as birth parents were supposed to give their children to those better suited to raise them than they, and as adoptive parents were to raise their new children and never reflect on the ones they might have had, if only....

But for all three members of the triad, and especially for the children, the ghost beings---who they might have been, and who their birth parents might have been---are powerful psychological forces with which, even today, the educational, medical and psychological communities are all too unfamiliar.

People assume that adoptive children (barring illnesses of any kind) will develop in the same ways as all other children, but as BJ Lifton shows us from her own upbringing, this is far from true. Such children carry other beings with them, secret selves, and secret birth parents, who live in their imaginations, and whom they need to discover and meet in order to develop a complete sense of self.

Herein, Lifton offers readers the very daring, candid observations she made concerning her own journey through self-discovery, the process of determining what it means to be adopted, and what it means to each and every adopted child to discover the biological roots from which they hail.

This book is superbly written, and should be required reading not only for adoptive parents, but for all members of the educational, psychological, social services and medical communities who ever come in contact with adopted children. Reading it was truly enlightening.

--Alyssa A. Lappen