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A review by lpm100
Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro
fast-paced
1.0
Book Review
Inheritance
Dani Shapiro
1/5 stars
"Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Personified."
*******
FIRST BIG THOUGHT:
One of the drawbacks of being an author is that you can take an event that is trivial enough to fill up a magazine article and turn it into an entire book.
Even when you shouldn't.
And that is exactly what this author did.
SECOND BIG THOUGHT:
Knowing the identity of a biological father is often not all it is cracked up to be.
Picture it: a Ghetto Bunny named "Pookie" has a baby with "Tanisha" (let's call baby "Tyrone" ) and then Pookie catches a case and goes to jail for several decades.
Tyrone knows every day of his life WHO his father is and WHERE he is, and it doesn't do him much good because the father can't show up for school events or even pay child support. (Not clear that he would be inclined to do it if he was out; but this removes all possibility.)
This author of this book had a father who was there with her every day and took her to events/doctor's appointments, and fed her and stayed with her and her batty mother until the end of his life.
But he was not her biological father and the author tortured herself to dig up the man who was--and hadn't thought about her since he dropped his sample off in a cup 54 years ago.
I don't know what benefit she thought that there was. (I thought that the book might have been about a child born of an illicit affair, but it was not.)
I don't know what sane person spends so much time thinking about another person that has never given her a thought or tried to find her.
This SEVERELY NARCISSISTIC author found out that she was conceived by a sperm donor because of her father's infertility. (As she reminded us every 10 or 15 pages, she has written nine books. Four of them were memoirs, and one of the fiction books was semi-autobiographical; Even B.Hussein Obama only needed a couple of memoirs to say what he had to say, and he actually did something that a large number of people care about.)
1. Honestly, it could have been compressed into the length of a magazine article.
2. It could have been a book about the history/ethics of sperm donation.
3. It could have been about the racial aspects of Judaism (because she gave us at least a half a dozen examples of where Jewish people did not believe that she was because she did not "look the part.")
Whatever it could have been, it was not because the authors massive ego/self-obsessed introspection was not able to get out of the way so that the story could be told. (I don't know how she could manage to conceive her own child; she aware that there was another person in the room during the act?)
The author does a lot of crazy shit (and it seems that her mother was just as crazy as she was).
(p. 215) Baking Xmas cookies because she thought it was a connection to her father?
(p. 232) Her mother wrote a two-page single space letter to camp about instructions how to handle her daughter?
(p. 66) She just has to drop in a childhood event to let us know that she knows the Kushners (This is the son-in-law of Donald Trump.) And she claims that her family was Orthodox, but she described her father coming from "Temple"?
Verdict: NOT RECOMMENDED
Inheritance
Dani Shapiro
1/5 stars
"Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Personified."
*******
FIRST BIG THOUGHT:
One of the drawbacks of being an author is that you can take an event that is trivial enough to fill up a magazine article and turn it into an entire book.
Even when you shouldn't.
And that is exactly what this author did.
SECOND BIG THOUGHT:
Knowing the identity of a biological father is often not all it is cracked up to be.
Picture it: a Ghetto Bunny named "Pookie" has a baby with "Tanisha" (let's call baby "Tyrone" ) and then Pookie catches a case and goes to jail for several decades.
Tyrone knows every day of his life WHO his father is and WHERE he is, and it doesn't do him much good because the father can't show up for school events or even pay child support. (Not clear that he would be inclined to do it if he was out; but this removes all possibility.)
This author of this book had a father who was there with her every day and took her to events/doctor's appointments, and fed her and stayed with her and her batty mother until the end of his life.
But he was not her biological father and the author tortured herself to dig up the man who was--and hadn't thought about her since he dropped his sample off in a cup 54 years ago.
I don't know what benefit she thought that there was. (I thought that the book might have been about a child born of an illicit affair, but it was not.)
I don't know what sane person spends so much time thinking about another person that has never given her a thought or tried to find her.
This SEVERELY NARCISSISTIC author found out that she was conceived by a sperm donor because of her father's infertility. (As she reminded us every 10 or 15 pages, she has written nine books. Four of them were memoirs, and one of the fiction books was semi-autobiographical; Even B.Hussein Obama only needed a couple of memoirs to say what he had to say, and he actually did something that a large number of people care about.)
1. Honestly, it could have been compressed into the length of a magazine article.
2. It could have been a book about the history/ethics of sperm donation.
3. It could have been about the racial aspects of Judaism (because she gave us at least a half a dozen examples of where Jewish people did not believe that she was because she did not "look the part.")
Whatever it could have been, it was not because the authors massive ego/self-obsessed introspection was not able to get out of the way so that the story could be told. (I don't know how she could manage to conceive her own child; she aware that there was another person in the room during the act?)
The author does a lot of crazy shit (and it seems that her mother was just as crazy as she was).
(p. 215) Baking Xmas cookies because she thought it was a connection to her father?
(p. 232) Her mother wrote a two-page single space letter to camp about instructions how to handle her daughter?
(p. 66) She just has to drop in a childhood event to let us know that she knows the Kushners (This is the son-in-law of Donald Trump.) And she claims that her family was Orthodox, but she described her father coming from "Temple"?
Verdict: NOT RECOMMENDED