Review by Booklist Review
After discovering that she had over 30 siblings debut author Bilton devoted herself to retracing her father's steps in order to understand her own origin story. In 1980s California, there were few options for LGBTQI+ people to become parents. Desperately wanting to start a family of her own, Bilton's mother, Debra, approached friends and was turned down. After a chance encounter with a man named Jeffrey, Debra decided to have a child via sperm donor. Jeffrey was a handsome free spirit, came from a wealthy family, and was generally everything that Debra sought in a donor. With Jeffrey's donor sperm, Debra became pregnant and felt she had created a perfect life. But what follows includes years of lying, with much of it centered around the fact that Jeffrey turned his one-time favor to Debra into a full-scale career of fathering children, complicating not only Debra's life, but the lives of her children, including the author. This debut memoir is a heartfelt rumination on the power of familial bonds, roots, and love.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
"The story of how I came into this world didn't begin in a bedroom, or bar, or on a beach with two lovers holding hands, gazing into each other's eyes under a pink sky as they professed their mutual adoration," writes Bilton in her compelling debut memoir. Instead, her single, lesbian mother Debra, currently sober after "getting high on every drug, religion, and sexual experiment to come out of the 1960s and '70s" and longing to have a child, met beautiful hippie Jeffrey Harrison at a Beverly Hills hair salon, then paid him $2,000 for a sperm donation and a promise that he would "never do this for anyone else." Feeling ashamed for "not giving us a father in the "real" sense of the word," Debra paid Jeffrey to give her foot massages, sporadically visiting Chrysta, and to likewise father her sister Kaitlyn. He also visited the California Cryobank for a decade as Donor 150, a secret revealed years later along with the arrival of her 35 (and possibly hundreds more) siblings. VERDICT Eloquently written and compulsively readable, Bilton's jaw-dropping coming-of-age memoir--and the love and survival found within its pages--is one readers won't soon forget.--Denise Miller
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An entertaining memoir about a uniquely dysfunctional family. In her debut memoir, Bilton tells two remarkable stories. One is the chronicle of her wildly unconventional childhood as the daughter of a woman described by a friend, without much exaggeration, as "one of the great characters of the Western world." Growing up "in Beverly Hills in the 1950s in a high-society family--the prized granddaughter of a former governor of California…and the daughter of a prominent judge in Los Angeles," Debra Olson was many things: an Eastern spiritualist; an out lesbian in homophobic times; a master saleswoman, making and losing millions in pyramid schemes; a friend of many celebrities; Ross Perot's "civil rights coordinator"; and a hedonist and sometime addict who yearned "to overdose on everything, especially life." Though her daughters were by far the most important part of her life, the girls' childhoods were marked by instability and loss, with both their father, Jeffrey, and many other second "mothers" coming and going on a regular basis. Bilton's warts-and-all depiction is sometimes hilarious, sometimes horrifying, always grounded in extraordinary forgiveness and resilience. The second story is the tale of Donor 150, who was by far the most popular option for those purchasing sperm at the California Cryobank in Century City, recommended constantly by the nurses and the doctor who ran the place. In 2005, over a decade after his retirement from the sperm donation business, Jeffrey saw a headline on the front page of the New York Times: "HELLO, I'M YOUR SISTER. OUR FATHER IS DONOR 150." The author was a sophomore in college at the time, and it would be another two years before she became aware of the situation. By then, there were documentaries, magazine articles, a Facebook group, and ever more popular DNA testing. By that time, as she would soon learn, she was dating her own brother. A wholly absorbing page-turner that everyone will want to read. You should probably buy two. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
