Today, I saw myself in my daughter's face, her cheek's bone-drawn up-sweep. What does it mean that one daughter has my toes and the other does not? Or my personality? How do I relate to them differently? See them for themselves apart from me? What biological construction is at work here? Alignment of our intrinsic sense of who we are with the genetic material from which we are formed is something we only sometimes consider. 

Until we must. When a genetic test proved beyond doubt that writer Dani Shapiro (born April 10, 1962) was not related to the father who raised her, she underwent a disintegration of identity, an investigation of truth, and a reconstruction of self.

I woke up one morning and life was as I had always known it to be. There were certain things I thought I could count on. For example, I looked at my hand and knew it was mine. My foot was my foot. My face, my face. My history, my history. After all, it's impossible to know the future, but we can be reasonably sure about the past. By the time I went to bed that night, my entire history—the life I had lived—had crumbled beneath me, like the buried ruins of an ancient forgotten city.

In Inheritance, Shapiro demands, "If my father was not my father, who was he? If my father was not my father, who was I?"   I read a similar tale of identity recently from Sir Paul Nurse whose work on cell regulation and propagation won the geneticist a Nobel Prize in 2001. Midway into his career, Nurse discovered that his parents were actually his grandparents. Nurse's understanding is more scientific, genes are chemical entities and are thus part of who we all are.

Unable to ask either of her deceased parents the truth, Shapiro traces records at a fertility clinic, interviews family and community members, and ultimately finds her biological father and relatives.   I've omitted a large narrative thread of Inheritance that pertains to Shapiro's search and discovery of her biological father. It is a complex and emotional sub-plot well-worth reading in your own space and time.

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

After a lifetime of anchoring herself in the genetic makeup she imagined she had, Shapiro felt firmly connected to a Jewish heritage and tradition. She felt disconnected from this community once she learned her lineage was not her lineage.   I am not Jewish, but I have many friends who are, and one conversation in particular helps me understand what Shapiro might have felt. A friend of mine is an atheist Jew, and I asked him what he was passing down to his children if not the religion. "The culture, the tradition," he said. "The shared history. Even the genes have a shared history."  
Shared genes. Do I feel anything like that?  
My maiden name is Schneider. The first time I went to Germany, I felt home. Things made sense, people looked like me. It was familiar.  
Harvard has a large Jewish student population. When I first got to college, I was frequently invited to Hillel, the Jewish dining hall, to re-find my "Jewishness." I explained I wasn't Jewish. The inquiries stopped.  
And yet... my paternal grandfather, John Schneider, was adopted, and I always wondered if he might be Jewish. If I might be Jewish. I think my adolescent self just wanted to belong to a group of people that seemed like they were a group of people. Being a white Christian wasn't really anything. It just was what people I knew were.  
Grandpa took a genealogical test before he died, and it confirmed we are almost entirely Northern European Caucasian.  
When I took my husband's name, Vrana, I did so with ease, knowing it came from a part of the world, Bohemia, that was in close proximity to the place of my ancestors, Bavaria. Our possible shared genealogy mattered to me.  
None of this—being German or Christian, etc.—would mean anything to me other than the fact that it had been the heritage I knew my entire life. That repeated narrative becomes part of us. It becomes us. That is why it so mattered to me, to Shapiro.

 My daughter's footprints at birth. She has my high arches.

C. S. Lewis once wrote about the physical nature of grief. Our emotions often calcify in our physical state, shrouding the bones to the tips of our hair. Shapiro's physical self feels the repercussions of her mental confusion: "My mind and body seem to be disconnected."

My body wasn't the body I had believed it to be for fifty-four years. My face wasn't my face. That's what it felt like. If my body wasn't my body and my face wasn't my face, who was I? [...] I had dinner with my best friend … I'll stand in her living room, tears streaming down my face and ask: 'Do you still see me as the same person?'

And yet, amid tremendous uncertainty and upheaval, Shapiro deeply empathizes with her father. Did he know? Was he told? Was he lied to? What might he have felt if he did know?   Shapiro's difficult relationship with her mother seems to predispose her to imagine her mother a perpetrator rather than victim; that she must have known and lied to Shapiro's father.  
I often find this limitation when it concerns our mothers. We fail to see them as individuals. It is easier to disassociate with fathers. Read more in What We Write About When We Write About Our Mothers. Is this empathy her way of connecting to someone from whom she felt abruptly severed?

The question that Shapiro barely asks but inevitably answers is: Why did it matter?

Why did it matter so much? After all, my parents were long dead. I had survived them. I had built a life. I had a family of my own. Whatever their secrets they were now buried, lost to history. My latest book was the first of my memoirs that had nothing to do with my parents.

It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life—even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine—and still not know the truth of oneself.

The lingering postscript of Inheritance is not its answers but its questions. Shapiro abides in her examined life without all possible knowledge. We all do. We are still determining who we are. We never will.

My wedding dress. Will I pass it on to my daughter? Will it bind us? Will it bind her? Photograph by Chris Cook.

An examined life, to me, means a search for answers, knowledge, means of knowing, and the boundaries of our consciousness.

A process, not an arrival. We sculpt and form knowledge to define who we are, but we must consider who we are isn't static. And thus not knowable.

'I gave you life!' my mother screamed at me whenever she was at her angriest, when I wasn't complying with her wishes or to her will. 'I gave you life!' I had always found it borderline funny, but also disturbing, that my mother felt the need to underscore this bedrock parental fact. On each of my birthdays as an adult, I was meant to call her - it never occurred to me that it was usually the other way around - and thank her for having me. But here were the noxious fumes, leaking from beneath the sealed door where the truth resided.

Shapiro's writing is divine, direct (you will swear she's talking to you), curious, and brave. Accompany Inheritances with Mark Strand's reflection of time, space, poetry, and being. Strand, a favorite of Shapiro's and mine, posits existence is a function of place and being.

The crumbling of our narrative can happen instantly and can change everything. "And then I remembered...," Joan Didion wrote when she suddenly lost her husband. "Life as you know it is over," wrote Didion when she lost her daughter.

This body of thought reminds me of something Buddhist monk and thought leader Thích Nhất Hạnh wrote in his book on repairing the past in the present.

We are the recipients of a genetic inheritance from our mother, our father, and all of our ancestors. If you have a grandfather who live to be ninety, this grandfather is still alive in you. If you are weak, if there are cells in you that are not functioning properly, you should call on that grandfather in yourself and say, “Grandfather, come help me.” Your grandfather will manifest immediately; and you will know that your grandfather is not just a notion, he is a reality within you. Every one of your cells has your grandfather in it.
From Thích Nhất Hạnh's You Are Here

Throughout life, we will be called to reconstruct our self. Assembling what we believe to be who we are. Moreover, we will be asked to move forward in this new self.

Thankfully, Shapiro shows us how.