The girl I am, was, and never will be A speculative memoir of transracial adoption

Review by Booklist Review

Transracial adoptee author Gibney guides readers through the time line of her youth as she makes sense of her adoption, birth parents, and identity. Using the present tense, Gibney describes her youth as a mixed-Black girl being brought up by a white family in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during the 1980s. Despite the unending love her adoptive mother provides, Gibney can't help but acknowledge the dissimilarities between herself and her family. Fast-forward to her college years: Gibney builds a fervent desire to connect with her blood relatives. What she discovers are mixed reviews of her Black birth father (who has passed away) and jumbled emotions toward her birth mother, who is white and recovering from alcoholism. Gibney eschews the "tools of mainstream literary fiction," blending her lived experiences as the adopted Shannon with fictionalized scenes where she appears as Erin Powers, the name given to her at birth. The inclusion of personal photos and letters allows Gibney to further reimagine her story in order to appreciate her past, present, and future while educating readers on the adoption process--and the fallacies and epistemological violence perpetrated by the "literature of adoption." Readers will praise the raw honesty and insight in this lovingly crafted memoir. Recommend to admirers of Echo Brown's Black Girl Unlimited (2020).

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Gibney strikes an intriguing balance between memoir and fantasy in this kaleidoscopic portrait that chronicles both her real-life childhood as Shannon Gibney and an alternate imagined life as Erin Powers, her birth name. After she's born in January 1975, the biracial protagonist is, in reality, immediately relinquished by her white birth mother and adopted seven months later by white parents Jim and Susan Gibney. But elsewhere--in another dimension that the first-person narrator initially glimpsed through a wormhole in her mirror when she was 10--Erin lives, instead, with her birth mom and maintains close, if at times contentious, relationships with her extended family. What follows is an exploration of the subject's identity as a transracial adoptee as examined through the protagonists' differing--and sometimes eerily similar--lives across a nonlinear timeline. Collected letters and photographs from Gibney's real life feature alongside recursive imaginings of who she might be if Gibney had grown up with her biological family. Asking the question, "Who was that girl, and who is she now?" this richly textured telling fills in the blanks "with scraps of speculation" where personal histories remain unknown. The result is a fantastical, transcendent memory collage that shirks convention in search of what is real and true about familial bonds. Ages 14--up. (Jan.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An ambitiously authentic adoption story where fiction does the work of truth, and archives, correspondence, and health records provide the roots of fantasy. When she was 19, Shannon Elaine Gibney met Erin Rebecca Powers via a letter from Child and Family Services of Michigan. Yet their existences had already been deeply and intimately interwoven. Shannon was adopted by middle-class White parents Jim and Susan Gibney soon after her birth in 1975, but her alcoholic White birth mother, Patricia Powers, had named her Erin. Narratively, time and space become impressively distorted as Gibney relays autobiographical accounts of Shannon and Erin that complicate her conceptions of self as a transracial adoptee, biracial Black woman, writer, and science-fiction fan. Erin is imagined at dinner tables with extended family whom Shannon would never know well, if it all, facing the racist familial microaggressions she can't quite avoid in any timeline. Biographical elements are similarly reconfigured: A maternal genetic predisposition to cancer and discovering parts of her Black biological father and his family tree that had all but been erased help flesh out Shannon and Erin in fuller, more embodied ways. Gibney invokes poet Audre Lorde as a sort of third mother, a source of creative inspiration and guidance. As both Erin and Shannon proceed through the spiral wormhole that threads this text together, Gibney offers up the singularly essential connective tissue of a robust and personal body of work. An innovative and captivating reflection on identity and self. (author's note, further reading) (Speculative nonfiction. 14-adult) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The literature of adoption is a fictional genre in itself. Adoptees know it to be generally as fantastical as any space opera--­and just as entertaining to the masses. Every story must begin with the vulnerable but good-­hearted poor birth mother who loves her baby very much but cannot take care of it (the birth father is always conspicuously absent in these narratives). There is a kindly, upper-­middle-­class, usually white couple who desperately wants a child, and have pursued all avenues in order to get one (if the couple is adopting internationally, they are in a rich country in the Global North, and have spent years on various lists, waiting for an available child, many times spending thousands of dollars). They fight, despite all odds, to build their family through adoption, in the process creating a healthy, happy, thriving child who eventually grows into a healthy, happy, thriving adult who has bonded perfectly with their new colorblind family. All this miraculous transformation from a poor, brown, cast-­off orphan. Love conquers all. Once the birth mother has given up the child, she is no longer part of the story. Once the child is adopted, there is no talk of loss of first family, culture, language, or community. The adoption is simply a bureaucratic event that happened, and then is over. Since the birth father was not part of the story from the beginning, he is not part of the adoptee's story as it progresses. And if you ask about any of the particularities of this literature of adoption: who is adopting whom, from where to where, what are the racial dynamics of the transaction, the role that money plays, corruption, the trauma of removal, the burden of assimilation, you are branded an angry and maladjusted adoptee. When most of the literature written about a marginalized group of people comes from white adoptive parents who are psychologists, sociologists, creative writers, and professors who don't identify themselves as adoptive parents in their "objective" work, what other possible outcome could there be? This is how I came to understand epistemological violence. In my body. Excerpted from The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption by Shannon Gibney All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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