Book Review of Inheritance

I’ve been on a bit of a fiction bender, because it helps me to stay off my phone in moments of downtime. I’m working to loosen my draw to the social media Bermuda Triangle (insta, twitter, FB), and fiction does the job. But, this time I picked up this memoir I’d asked for this Christmas. I like memoir because it often reads immersively like fiction, but also interacts with broader questions of our day. In Inheritance, author Dani Shapiro looks at questions of identity and also the ethics of commercial DNA tests.

From the publisher: In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her.

“Memoir gold: a profound and exquisitely rendered exploration of identity and the true meaning of family.” —People Magazine

⭐️⭐️⭐️/⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I really liked this book, but it wasn’t my very favorite. I have more than one friend whose life was upended by unexpected news from an ancestory.com/23 & me sort of DNA test. I was hoping that Shapiro would dive deeper into the broader ethical implications of these tests. This is a mostly personal memoir that asks of us to examine identity and what makes us us. It also looks back a bit at the history and ethics of early IVF and assisted reproductive technologies. I deeply enjoyed the prose and cadence of the book, her husband is a reporter and the book benefits from an investigative timbre.