Ithaka: A Daughter's Memoir of Being Found

When 23-year-old Sarah Saffian picked up the phone in January 1993 and heard a woman's voice on the other end say, "I think I'm your birth mother," she embarked on a journey both longed for and feared by almost all adopted children, the parents who raised them, and the ones who gave them up. Saffian's case was unusual: her birth parents eventually married and had three more children, her full-blood siblings. She honestly depicts her feelings of wariness and sometimes annoyance as they gently pressed her for a reunion. It was three years before Saffian felt ready to visit Hannah Morgan and Adam Leyder.

As befits a topic of such intimacy, Saffian sticks closely to specifics. She not only delineates her own shifting emotions with precision, she quotes extensively from her birth parents' letters to vividly reveal their personalities (Hannah understands her caution, Adam is needier and pushier). Saffian does not identify any of the players as villains or victims, despite the tricky emotional space they navigate, but finds human beings doing their best to give and receive love in circumstances for which there are no fixed guidelines.