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2 BOOKS OFFER PERSONAL STORIES--AND HELPFUL FACTS--ABOUT ADOPTION
Two books based on babies born in the sexual revolution of the 1960s have just been published-\"Ithaka: A Daughter's Memoir of Being Found,\" by Sarah Saffian, and \"May the Circle Be Unbroken: An Intimate Journey Into the Heart of Adoption,\" by Lynn C. Franklin (who gave up her baby at birth), with Elizabeth Ferber. Saffian, a New York journalist born in 1969, received a call out of the blue in 1993 from her birth parents as she was about to leave for the office. Her story is unusual in two profound ways: Her birth parents, who attended college together, eventually married each other and had three more children, and Saffian's adoptive mother died when the girl was only 7. Her adoptive father then remarried and had two more children. Added to this complex tale, which reads like a novel, is the fact that her birth father's own parents died when he was a young boy, and he was raised by another family. (One note that reveals that adoption is not yet out of the closet completely: In an attempt to protect the identities of all parties involved, the college of the birth parents was changed. Unfortunately, Dartmouth College, the pseudonym for the real college, did not admit women until 1972.) Starting with the initial call, through the letters and then the photos she receives, Saffian feels as if she has been violated. Usually, she notes, it is the child who tracks down the parents. For months she doesn't write back. Finally she sends photos of herself. She tracks her anger, despair and ambivalence in a sensitive and wrenching way. \"Did I think that they were being presumptuous, in telling me why I looked the way I did, in being proud of me, in loving me? Or did I welcome the genetic link that previously I'd only imagined? I wasn't sure. I felt both.\" (Saffian admits feeling that she has to please her birth parents and her adoptive parents, and perhaps that is what compelled her to include so much of her birth father's letters. One senses that she cut out a great deal, but it is the story of the abandoned child we are most interested in, and a heavier pencil could have honed the book to a finer read.)
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