Here are 56 books that The Girls Who Went Away fans have personally recommended if you like
The Girls Who Went Away.
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After I was sent for a breast biopsy in 2008, my twin sister and I began the very real work of researching our closed adoption. My health, my sister’s, and our collective six children depended upon it. For nearly five decades, I had placed my adoption in an internal lockbox, one I had promised myself I would get to “one day.” At 48, that day had finally come. Concurrent with my search, I absorbed many of the books I mention here. These works became foundational in how I came to view my adoption, and they provided the support I needed during the search and reunion process.
I loved Glaser’s book because it skillfully presents closed adoption history within the context of a real-life story. For me, it took the best parts of Nancy Verrier’s and Ann Fessler’s books and presented them as a puzzle that needed solving.
The gripping account of a birth mother and her son who were thwarted at many junctures in their desire to reconnect authentically highlighted the injustices of a rigid, closed adoption system. The book also validated the struggles my twin sister and I faced in reconnecting with our own birth relatives.
Like my own story, this is a tale of love and loss that highlights the importance of identity and belonging.
The shocking truth about postwar adoption in America, told through the bittersweet story of one teenager, the son she was forced to relinquish, and their search to find each other.
During the Baby Boom in 1960s America, women were encouraged to stay home and raise large families, but sex and childbirth were taboo subjects. Premarital sex was common, but birth control was hard to get and abortion was illegal. In 1961, sixteen-year-old Margaret Erle fell in love and became pregnant. Her enraged family sent her to a maternity home, and after she gave birth,…
After I was sent for a breast biopsy in 2008, my twin sister and I began the very real work of researching our closed adoption. My health, my sister’s, and our collective six children depended upon it. For nearly five decades, I had placed my adoption in an internal lockbox, one I had promised myself I would get to “one day.” At 48, that day had finally come. Concurrent with my search, I absorbed many of the books I mention here. These works became foundational in how I came to view my adoption, and they provided the support I needed during the search and reunion process.
When I finished Verrier’s work–long considered a classic in adoption literature–I felt understood in a deep and powerful way. The author affirmed the feelings of confusion, sadness, and loss that I have often experienced when considering the adoption of my twin sister and me. Because we had been raised in a loving adoptive family, I had not considered our adoption as a trauma.
But of course, any time a meaningful bond is ruptured or abruptly severed, trauma is the result. I also found validity in Verrier’s position that adoption and the subsequent loss of knowledge and contact with birth mothers impact an adoptee’s future relationships.
The Primal Wound is a seminal work which revolutionizes the way we think about adoption. It describes and clarifies the effects of separating babies from their birth mothers as a primal loss which affects the relationships of the adopted person throughout life.. It is a book about pre-and perinatal psychology, attachment, bonding, and loss. It gives adoptees, whose pain has long been unacknowledged or misunderstood, validation for their feelings, as well as explanations for their behavior. It lists the coping mechanisms which adoptees use to be able to attach and live in a family to whom they are not related…
After I was sent for a breast biopsy in 2008, my twin sister and I began the very real work of researching our closed adoption. My health, my sister’s, and our collective six children depended upon it. For nearly five decades, I had placed my adoption in an internal lockbox, one I had promised myself I would get to “one day.” At 48, that day had finally come. Concurrent with my search, I absorbed many of the books I mention here. These works became foundational in how I came to view my adoption, and they provided the support I needed during the search and reunion process.
Because of my own work as an adoption writer and advocate for open adoption records, I knew each of these writers from webinars, podcasts, conferences, and social media. Combining their varied backgrounds and experiences–Sara is an adoptee, Kelsey is a birth parent, and Lori is an adoptive parent–was thrilling to read.
I devoured each of the thoughtful interviews and the candid responses the authors compiled and presented. Like these authors, I believe that by working together with truth and transparency, it is possible to move adoption forward toward a healing place.
Reveals the candid thoughts and feelings of those most directly involved in adoptions: the adoptee, the adopters, and the birth parents.
Adoption Unfiltered authors Sara Easterly (adoptee), Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard (birth parent), and Lori Holden (adoptive parent) interview more than 30 adoptees, 20 birth parents, a dozen adoptive parents, and several industry professionals-all sharing candidly about the challenges in adoption. While finding common ground in the sometimes-contentious space of adoption may seem like a lofty goal, it reveals the authors' optimistic aim: working together with truth and transparency to move toward healing.
After I was sent for a breast biopsy in 2008, my twin sister and I began the very real work of researching our closed adoption. My health, my sister’s, and our collective six children depended upon it. For nearly five decades, I had placed my adoption in an internal lockbox, one I had promised myself I would get to “one day.” At 48, that day had finally come. Concurrent with my search, I absorbed many of the books I mention here. These works became foundational in how I came to view my adoption, and they provided the support I needed during the search and reunion process.
When I first heard Gretchen Sisson speak about her long-term study involving birth mothers, I felt gratified. Through her impeccable research, she quantified the feelings and experiences Ann Fessler had written about her book, The Girls That Went Away.
Because of my reunion and relationship with my own birth mother, I understand the importance of giving these women a voice and validating it through a scientific study. The conversation with those touched by adoption is important work. For it offers to those outside the adoption constellation a serious and accurate glimpse inside.
“Dares to imagine a different world where Americans treat adoption like the justice issue it is.” ―Washington Post
“Impressively reported…[Sisson] uses her deep well of knowledge to make the case that adoption is no solution for Americans’ reduced access to abortion.” ―San Francisco Chronicle
A powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, revealing the grief of the American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real
Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion…
I’ve written books for kids of all ages, and always there were birds. Sparrows singing on windowsills, cardinals arrowing across yards, cormorants diving into Lake Erie, pigeons poking beneath park benches. Those things with feathers make my own heart sing! Slowly it dawned on me that I wanted to write a book where birds didn’t just flit across the pages but nested at the story’s heart. I had to do a lot of bird research for Perfect. What I learned about the precious, fragile bonds among all Earth’s creatures became one of the book’s themes: big and small, bound by gravity or able to defy it, we are all deeply connected.
Because…I adore multiple points of view. Here we get Marin, a foster child seeking clues to her past through the I Ching; a beleaguered but loveable social worker; a woman longing for a child; an orphaned owl out of his element in the city; and the Earth herself.
My favorite is Owl, who knows what it is to be abandoned and sees Marin as a hatchling he needs to protect. This is a short book with very brief chapters, but Crowder fills it with the wisdom of the ages (or is it the wisdom of owls?) I especially love how beautifully she handles friendship between generations and species.
A girl in foster care tries to find her birth mother before she loses her forever in this spare and beautifully told novel about last chances and new opportunities.
For a kid bouncing from foster home to foster home, The Book of Changes is the perfect companion. That’s why Marin carries three pennies and a pocket-sized I Ching with her everywhere she goes. Yet when everything in her life suddenly starts changing—when Marin lands in a foster home that feels like somewhere she could stay, maybe forever—the pennies don’t have any answers for her.
I am the author of over fifty books for young readers including the Zapato Power series, the Sofia Martinez series, Duck for Turkey Day, Unite or Die: How Thirteen States Became a Nation, Never Say a Mean Word Again, Tag Your Dreams: Poems of Play and Persistence, and The Porridge-Pot Goblin.Many of my books were inspired by my students during my days as a school librarian. Other books were inspired by my work as a Jewish educator in synagogue settings. I read voraciously and review for the Sydney Taylor Shmooze, an online blog about Jewish books.
Imani is thirteen and approaching her Bat Mitzvah. She is also an African-American adopted by a white Jewish family.
She has many questions about her birthparents and her own place in the world. When she has the opportunity to read the diary of her adopted mother’s grandmother who fled Europe as a Jewish refugee during World War II, Imani learns why sometimes mothers make impossible choices to save their children’s lives.
This novel is a riveting mix of history and coming of age.
Imani is adopted, and she's ready to search for her birth parents. Anna has left behind her family to escape from Holocaust-era Europe to meet a new family--two journeys, one shared family history, and the bonds that make us who we are. Perfect for fans of The Night Diary.
Imani knows exactly what she wants as her big bat mitzvah gift: to find her birth parents. She loves her family and her Jewish community in Baltimore, but she has always wondered where she came from, especially since she's black and almost everyone she knows is white. Then her mom's grandmother--Imani's…
I am a book publicist of roughly twenty years, a writer, and a reader. My award-winning short story collection, To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts (Fomite Press, 2017), deals with family, reconciliation, loss, and hope. My first novel, Geographies of the Heart (Fomite Press) was released in January 2022. It’s about the importance of forgiveness, the power of legacies, and the fertile but fragile terrain that is family, the first geography to shape our hearts. I am surrounded by books, live and breathe books, work with books. Lucky me!
Spare and poetic, this beautiful debut novel explores teenage pregnancy, adoption, and secrets. Addie Lockwood knows Roland Rhodes during high school. They live in a small Southern town and develop a friendship over an appreciation of blues music. But later, in their thirties, when they reconnect in California, Addie falls in love with Roland. When she later realizes she’s pregnant, she makes a critical and heartbreaking decision: she doesn’t tell Roland about the baby, whom she names Byrd, and she gives the child up for adoption. But Addie never stops thinking about Byrd, wondering, hoping one day he will fly back her way. This novel is gorgeously written and what an ending.
Chautauqua Prize Finalist, 2015 Crook's Corner Book Prize for Best Debut Novel Set in the American South, 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award, Bronze Medal for Literary Fiction, 2015 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize Long List, 2014 SIBA Book Award Long List, 2015 Balcones Fiction Prize Finalist, 2015
Addie Lockwood believes in books. Roland Rhodes believes in blues guitar. Coming of age in the small-town South of the 1970s, they form a friendship as extraordinary as it is unlikely.
They meet again in their disillusioned thirties, this time in California, where Roland's music career has landed him. Venice Beach is exotic, a…
I don’t just write stories, I study them. I’ve noticed that nearly every major hero/ine’s journey and epic tale has an adoption component. From Bible stories and Greek myths (adoption worked out well for Moses, not so much for Oedipus) to Star Wars through This Is Us, we humans are obsessed with origin stories. And it’s no wonder: “Where do I come from?” and “Where do I belong?” are questions that confound and comfort us from the time we are tiny until we take our final breath. As an adoptive mother and advocate for continuing contact with birth families, I love stories about adoption, because no two are alike. They give us light and insight into how families are created and what it means to be a family—by blood, by love, and sometimes, the combination of the two.
The pioneering godmother of the open-adoption movement in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Silber did ground-shaking work to bring transparency to the adoption process, which ultimately, is better for the mental health of all parties involved. In Dear Birthmother, a primer of sorts, she helps adoptive parents understand the love, humanity, and loss intrinsic to placing a child for adoption. I love this book because it shines a light on the much-deserved compassion to these women who give up so much in search of a better life for themselves and their children.
This is the third revised edition of the open adoption classic recommended by the Child Welfare League of America. Gently provocative, warm and convincing, this open adoption guide includes actual letters between adoptive parents and birthparents, and between the latter and the children they have
I am adopted. I am a birth mother and also a mother through adoption. I have lived through all ‘three faces’ of adoption and know how each ‘face’ affects millions of people's lives all over the world. I am passionate that conversations around adoption need to come out of the closet and the secrecy surrounding the subject must disappear. By writing my books, I am on a mission to support adoptees, birth mothers, and adoptive parents and help them realise they are not alone. After publication of my first book in the Survival Without Roots trilogy, I am humbled that people are reaching out to say that reading Book One has helped them so much.
Communication through letters is a lovely way to be able to say what you feel to all those in Gaynor’s life who shunned her, loved her, and abandoned her. She never met some of the recipients, but the feelings and emotions as an adoptee have remained lodged in her memory for years. Her book unearths them and unleashes them through the power of the written word. Gaynor does not hold back and writes her letters with an honesty and a rawness that is touching.
It is the 1960s; a sixteen-year-old girl is in a mother and baby home; her heart is breaking as she prepares to give up her baby for adoption.
Shunned by society, she has no choice.
That baby was me.
Join me on my life’s journey through the letters I have written to everyone who has shared my unique story. Follow me as I find the courage to share this story, from my birth to my unhappy adoption to getting married and becoming a mum and granny.
Learn how I took control of my life after disassociating myself from my past,…
I am an adoptive parent and I often use stories to help my children to understand and process emotive topics. While we were going through the adoption process, I couldn’t find any stories that adequately explained why some children can’t stay with their birth families, so I decided to create my own! I found the waiting during the adoption process quite unbearable and put every spare minute to good use, reading books by adoptees and birth parents, so that I could understand the experiences of the people affected most by adoption. These autobiographies were a tough, emotional read at times, but they all changed me for the better.
It is rare to find the view of a birth father in a story or online, so I was keen to read this to help widen my perspectives. This insightful, reflective autobiography helped me to imagine how my son’s birth father may be affected by the adoption. Andrew shares how the loss of his son to adoption has affected so many of his choices throughout the rest of his life. I read this around the time that I was due to write a contact letter to my son’s birth parents, and I feel that it helped me to write something that I hope his birth parents will find supportive and reassuring, rather than a superficial update to “tick the box.”
In the first-ever British birth-father memoir, Andrew Ward reflects on his own experience of losing a child to adoption to show how a traumatic teenage incident complicated his life. Thirty years after the adoption Ward set out to break down barriers, find his son and seek resolution. In this book he describes his search and, through flashback stories, illustrates how being a birth father has impacted on his relationships with women, career decisions, writing projects and assembly of attitudes. This is a book about secrecy, shame and self-punishment, but it is also a book about wonderful friendships, amazing coincidences and…
