Laura Noggle's Reviews > Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

In her early 50s, Shapiro learns she is not the biological child of her father. Introspective and compelling narrative on identity. My first introduction to Shapiro.

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”

“The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.”

“Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?”