The Other Mother: A Lesbian's Fight for Her Daughter

Author’s Note

Author's Note I once heard Grace Paley say that any story told twice is fiction. I believe that statement wholeheartedly. And yet, what follows is not fiction. It is the truest rendition I could give of my experience . Nonetheless, I have created many fictions in order to tell this story. I have changed the names of characters and places to protect the privacy of the real people about whom I have written. At times I have condensed conversations or events, or altered them slightly for the sake of clarity. I have chosen details to include , and to exclude, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. Almost all of this work is based upon my journals in which I have recorded bits of conversation, impressions and emotions. What hadn't been recorded is reconstructed from my memory, and with help from people who were close to me at the time the events took place. I wrote this book during the years when I had no contact with my daughter. Reconstructing our lives together-how she came to be and how I came to lose her-was, in effect, my only way to spend time with her. It was also my way of making sense of what happened to our family, and what I saw happening to other families like ours around the country. Of course this story would be very different had any other party involved been the one to tell it. All that said, I have tried to follow another of Grace Paley's aphorisms in writing this down. When asked how she knows when a story is complete, she answered: When it is as honest as it can be. I have tried here to write as honest a story as I can, using fictional techniques at times, but always holding to the truth as I experienced it. xi The Other Mother ...