What’s it about?
In short: It’s the story of the author’s adoption, adoptive family, and reunion with her birthfamily — her natal parents and their five children — after 35 years.
It’s the story of two teenagers of different classes and ethnic backgrounds who meet by chance, fall in love, find their parents will not allow them to marry, and go off to college only to discover that they are going to have a child. She is spirited away to a home for unwed mothers, gives birth, signs the relinquishment papers, goes home. In four years, when they are old enough to marry despite their parents, they do. In the next twenty-five years, they have five more children together. Their first child, adopted at three months old, grows up in the knowledge of being different because she is adopted, and as an adult begins the search when her father dies. She discontinues it out of fear, then begins it again in 1998. In the same month, July of 1998, they all find the New York State adoption registry and are reunited in February of 1999. This reunion is the impetus of the story, the cataclysm that begins it and ends it both.
Praise for Coming Apart Together
In this vivid, beautifully written memoir, Hipchen looks back with rediscovered anger and bountiful compassion.
—Marianne Novy, author of Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, Reading Adoption, and Adoption Memoirs
Emily Hipchen’s Coming Apart Together gives us vital and poignant perspectives on both adoption and autobiography
—William L. Andrews, Emeritus E. Maynard Adams Professor of English, UNC-Chapel Hill, author To Tell a Free Story and Classic American Autobiographies
Hipchen's break from traditional, linear sequencing is one of the many attractions of her braided essay/memoir. Even the title evokes an image of parting and reweaving. Readers will admire Hipchen's writerly brilliance and identify with her experience even if not an adoptive parent or adopted child. One needn't have had a wild and crazy childhood in Texas to fall in love with Mary Karr's The Liar's Club or been a poverty-stricken boy in Ireland to be fascinated by Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. I could find no better mouthpiece to the sacred in this compelling memoir than Emily Hipchen's own words: "We are all children looking for our lost parents. Or lost parents, looking for our children. (Review from Amazon)
Read this book if you want to understand and experience . . . the heart of adoption memoirs.
—Rebecca Hogan, emerita editor, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
