Bastards A Memoir [Paperback]

???Sheer gorgeousness.??????Gregarious, soul-baring.??????Painful and heartfelt.??????Fearlessly untangles the complicated story of a family plagued by abundantloss who nevertheless redefine what it means to love and forgive.??????A wise and indispensable meditation on the true nature of family, the dislocations of adoption, and all the vital species of love. She brings light to them all.??????An impressive debut. . . . [Mary Anna King???s] prose moves with lyrical wit and cultural texture as she persists with all of her protean self to figure out the nature of family and the deepest human connections amid trauma and confusion.??????Is it OK to repeatedly burst out laughing in the middle of a crowded coffeehouse before explaining to fellow customers, ???It???s this hilarious new book about a crazy family that gave away their children the way other families send out Christmas cards???? If not, I apologize for all the interrupted coffee breaks and lift my cup to Mary King and her glorious???Funny and wise and very entertaining. If you think you had a weird childhood, well, King???s book will put that right into perspective. At the same time even readers who are cynical on the subject of Family will be persuaded, somewhat, that in the last analysis it???s a good thing.??????A moving portrait of the struggle to create a family out of little more than the imagination. In scene by finely wrought scene, punctuated by bursts of lyric intensity and hard-won humor, King reminds us that a good story is not in the ending but in the questions, that in this life the only resolution we get, sometimes, is acceptance, and that this can be enough.??????At turns hilarious, at turns heartbreaking,???As I read Mary King???s extraordinary memoir, Searing . . . explores how identity forms love, and love, identity. Written in engrossing, intimate prose, it makes us rethink how blood???s deep connections relate to the attachments of proximity. ???Andrew Solomon, author of