Relative Strangers is a moving collection of personal stories exploring how adoption, donor conception, unexpected biological connections, and family secrets shape identity, belonging, and our understanding of kinship. Why was this an important book for you to write?

Adoptees, donor-conceived people, and others who’ve had an NPE (not parent expected) experience are often discouraged from telling their stories, are asked to keep secrets—even to be secrets—and it can be a great burden to shoulder those secrets and not be able to tell one’s truth. That silencing often arises from shame or guilt, and that shame spills over onto people who had no control over the circumstances of their conception and who never agreed to keep secrets or preserve others’ anonymity. This collection was created to give voice to these stories—to express the profound impact of secrecy, family discoveries, DNA surprises, and encounters with previously unknown close family.

Your introduction is deeply personal. How did your own experiences with identity and kinship influence your approach to editing the collection?

My own story is perhaps more complicated than most since it involves both maternal abandonment and an NPE experience, along with the discovery of an unusually large number of siblings. It was also somewhat unusual in that almost all of the relatives I discovered were warm and welcoming, and so it was a story that may have had more joy than many NPE experiences. What I wanted the collection to convey, however, was the broad range of experiences, the different emotional and practical repercussions, the often messy complexities of search and reunion, and the many ways different individuals ultimately define family.

Grief appears in many forms throughout the collection, including mourning relationships that never fully developed. Why was it important to make space for these less recognized forms of loss?

Grief is a thread that runs through each of these stories, and it arose naturally — that is, contributors were not asked to address grief — it emerged as one of the most consistent experiences related to these family discoveries. And that, I believe, is because there are few places where the particular kinds of grief that are so common among people who’ve had these experiences can be shared and understood. Overwhelmingly, the grief expressed is disenfranchised grief and ambiguous loss—that which is not acknowledged by society and for which there’s no source of support. As one contributor said, no one brings a casserole for this kind of loss. This is the pain of discovering a father who’s been dead for 20 years, or learning that the parent you’re seeking died two days before you reached out, or that you have family that would have loved to know you across a lifetime if they’d only known about you. These are losses that individuals typically have to mourn alone, or that are dismissed by others as insignificant. That trivializing of their experiences is a further kind of grief.

After readers finish the anthology, what do you hope they will reconsider about family, inheritance, and the meaning of belonging? 

I hope that individuals who’ve never experienced the revelation of a significant family secret or had a DNA surprise will come to understand both how important it is for many if not most individuals who have had these experiences to learn more about where they come from and who their parents were. People who know their parents and have had no such surprises take for granted that privilege and I’d like for these essays to increase their awareness, promote empathy and compassion, and let them realize that all adoptees and NPEs want is to know what everyone else knows about themselves, and when they reach out to biological family, they’re merely looking for acceptance and recognition.

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