Adoption Memoirs

Marianne Novy is Professor Emerita of English and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is author of Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama and editor of Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture.

“Marianne Novy has given us a rich and powerful exploration of the deep and wide river that is adoption, separating and joining families. Her book is of value to all of us touched by adoption, and truly in some way we are all touched by adoption.”-Barbara Katz Rothman, Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York "Novy’s voice rings out in the text through her passion for the subject and her own history…. [She] gives readers a full view of adoption - and leaves any judgment up to them…. Adoption Memoirs lays bare how America’s political infrastructure fails all families…. This book is an important work that treads new ground. It shows that 'happy endings' are something for fiction."-Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “The word adoption has a multitude of meanings and innuendos. For many years it was seen as a fix to a problem or a way for altruistic individuals or couples to form a family. But adoption adds layer upon layer of loss for all parties, as well as trauma for the adoptee. Marianne Novy’s Adoption Memoirs is an insightful glimpse into the many realities and narratives of adoption. Do not argue with any of these stories if they are not yours. Listen. Listen. Learn.”-Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao, Pavao Consulting and Coaching, and Lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School "Marianne Novy has done a masterful job of pulling on the threads of many memoirs and weaving them into a compelling narrative to make important points."-Jana Wolff, author of Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother "Novy's book is a must read for anyone who researches, studies or writes about adoption."-Lorraine Dusky, author of Hole In My Heart "Novy’s painstaking pattern-seeking moved me, and I found myself thinking not only about the individual stories and what it meant to have lived them, or how they did or didn’t relate to mine, but also about how adoption stories reflect and magnify universal human patterns.... That we all must grapple with similar knots around love, self-love, and identity helps adoption’s story get pieced back into our larger, human one, increasing empathy and understanding. Novy’s informed and patient scholarship does exactly this-and it matters greatly in the long effort towards reform."-Mom Egg Review