The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility by Margaret Homans (review)

Sigmund Freud’s paper “Family Romances” (1909) famously gave its name to a genre of storytelling—engaged in by young children everywhere—that aims to defend against feeling parentally undervalued and poorly loved. Freud hypothesized that a child’s “painful” but nonetheless developmentally necessary “sense that his own affection is not being fully reciprocated” by his parents “finds a vent in the idea … of being … an adopted child”; this idea, in turn, sets him on an imaginative quest to “free” himself “from the parents of whom he now has such a low opinion” and to replace them with a more deserving pair (Collected Papers, Volume 5, edited by James Strachey [Basic Books, 1959], 74–76). According to the logic of this alternative plot of origins, the accident of birth to which we are all subject is felt not as a randomly selected consequence of an indifferent universe, but rather as an egregious and personally suffered cosmic mistake: we ought to have been born to and brought up by parents perfectly attuned to our desires and needs, who understand us completely and effortlessly, express their appreciation explicitly and often, and cherish us for being the exceptionally lovable individuals we uniquely are.

Unlike those who are reared by their birth parents, adoptees find themselves cast into a version of the family romance (no matter that, in real life, adoptive parents are as prone to disappoint as biological ones). More often than not, they develop a feel for the optative, for “the ‘forking paths’ that could have led to a different life”—pursuing, as they are in fact, a life that, by all odds, ought to have been otherwise (291). Adoptees live what we might call the optative inverted: not what might I have been had I been born to another mother and father, but what might I have become had I been reared by the mother who bore me? What might my sense of myself, my sense of belonging, have been had my family shared my genes, my appearance, my skin color? How might I understand myself differently had the conscious choices of others, however constrained they may have been, been less fateful for me, less mysterious, less storied?

Margaret Homans’s wide-ranging, probing, generous, judicious, and at moments impassioned investigation into representations of adoption—in memoirs, novels, films, and non-fiction accounts, as well as in parental advice and advocacy literature, ancient myth and contemporary philosophy—makes clear how important the imaginative playing out of “what ifs” is for all of us. “Every ‘I’—and not just adopted ones—needs to recognize the impossibility, or at least the illusory foundations, of its own coherence” (152). Or, as Jeanette Winterson puts it, “reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open” (qtd. in Homans 154). Identity, on this view, is not “innate and intrinsic” (1), but rather a function of “experience” (207) and “roleplaying” (195), in Erving Goffman’s sense: an ongoing exercise in self-tuning, a process of “narrative self-invention,” that urges us to reflect both on how things are and how they might have been, in our own lives as well as in the lives of real or fictional others (148). The salutary, even therapeutic, effect of imagining other outcomes and possibilities speaks to the extraordinary appeal, the human necessity, of stories—especially those that solicit our empathy or identification.

Homans comes to suggest the general importance of optative thinking, for the most part, indirectly. An accomplished literary critic, she subjects all her texts—whatever the genre—to close reading, exposing how the putatively objective findings in many a “work of social analysis” are shaped by the ideological disposition and discourse of its author, or how the pathos of a personal memoir can disguise its weak reasoning (197). She argues strenuously against popular theories of “adoption trauma” that insist...