The Lost Family

“How was Pam to reconcile her new identity when she'd lived so long with an old one? She was of her father. And now her father was someone else.”
—Libby Copeland, The Lost Family

“We are all, of course, children of whims, and we've always known this to be true. Long before the DNA age brought to light tales of one-night-stands and donor-sperm-swaps, and the mix-up of two babies in a hospital. We are whims of our mothers deciding to attend a certain dinner party and meeting our fathers. We are whims of the sperm cell that beat out millions of other sperm cells to reach our mother's egg.
“And, as we come into being, we are still whims—of childhood accidents, and the precise locations of the houses we grew up in, of a college admissions officer, of an email never opened, of a drunk driver we never saw coming. As destabilizing as it is to admit, life is just one grand unfolding of accidents.”
—Libby Copeland, The Lost Family

Required reading for adoptees and “non-paternity events” (NPEs).