Family Wanted: Stories of Adoption

Despite Tolstoy's dictum that "happy families are all alike, [but] every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," this fine anthology shows us that families, biological and adoptive, are far more complicated. Holloway, a senior editor at Granta Books, has brought together 24 essays and two fictional pieces on adoption by noted writers including Jeanette Winterson, A.M. Homes, Robert Dessaix and Tama Janowitz—most are republished, but several were commissioned for this collection. Divided into sections about being an adopted child, giving up a child and becoming an adoptive parent, the volume finds its power in the intimate, often searing details of each story. In "This Is the Day We Give Babies Away," Priscilla T. Nagle writes in an eerily disembodied, third-person voice about answering the questions of the social worker who is facilitating the adoption of her son. In "Happenstance," Daniel Menaker writes lyrically of how "chance" and choice create families as much as biology." While all of the pieces celebrate love and caring, they are also imbued with a profound sense of grief and loss. Yet as Sandra Newman writes, "In the end, of course, we just grow up. We walk out of the theater and a whole world is going on outside." (Aug. 1)