Description
Hidden Girls: A Birth Mother's Story of Reunion and Reckoning brings readers into the emotional heart of adoption loss, showing how the secrets and silence of closed adoption permanently twist kinship histories and undermine the compassion of those involved in it.
MacDonnell, the award-winning author of two novels and a collection of short stories, was astounded when the son she'd relinquished as a teenager reached out to her via email after nearly 50 years. Mad with grief when they took him away, she'd kept the secret required by her parents in order to come back home. She'd accepted this humiliation and degradation as a kind of penance, a necessary offering. That is, until her son's sudden and unexpected reappearance in her life.
Writing about her experience, MacDonnell soon realized that the secret about her bastard son contained a host of other secrets, evasions, and equivocations in her family and the culture at large. Hence, her story was not only hers. Rather, it reflected the stories of countless other girls and women who'd lost their babies to secret adoption in the decades after World War II. Her story reflects the century's feminist battles for reproductive rights and healthcare. In answering the questions about what had happened to her, MacDonnell also shows what happened to as many as four million unmarried females during the years surrounding World War II and which may happen again with the overturning of Roe v Wade and the seemingly endless to struggle to hold onto reproductive choice.
Julia MacDonnell puts flesh on the bones of one of the most shameful parts of recent U.S. history: the Baby Scoop Era, when untold numbers of women were shamed, coerced and forced into relinquishing children born out of wedlock for secretive adoptions, then ordered to return to their lives as though nothing had happened. For far too long, our society has pretended nothing did. Hidden Girl is an important, beautifully-told accounting of that terrible history, and a timely warning that we not repeat its mistakes.
--Kathryn Joyce, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption
A beautiful, powerful, and truth-telling story...I was struck by how it is both every birth mother's story and a story that is completely unique to the author.
--Marylee MacDonald, Surrender: A Memoir of Nature, Nurture and Love
Product Details
| Publisher | Bookbaby |
| Publish Date | September 05, 2024 |
| Pages | 200 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9798350956672 |
| Dimensions | 9.0 X 6.0 X 0.5 inches | 0.7 pounds |
About the Author
Her second novel, Mimi Malloy, At Last!, published by Picador in 2014, was chosen as an 'Indie Next' selection by the ABA. People Magazine called it, "Cathartic, suspenseful and droll...Mimi offers a hopeful take on both old age and bad blood." Her first, A Year of Favor, based loosely on the murders of the four churchwomen in El Salvador in 1979, was published in 1994 by William Morrow & Co. Kirkus praised it as "Powerful first fiction...A convincing evocation of life in a Central American country...and a compelling portrait of a gutsy, post-feminist heroine."
Her journalism and literary writing have been recognized with three fiction fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, two Geraldine R. Dodge Fellowships for residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, two residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, and two Pushcart nominations.
MacDonnell is professor emeritus in the Writing Arts department at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J. where she taught undergraduate and graduate writing classes, and developed the creative writing curriculum for its Master of Arts in Writing program. She is a former nonfiction editor of Philadelphia Stories. She lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, a couple of miles from her daughter Suzanne's family.
Earn by promoting books
