The website Adoptee Reading has chosen my memoir on the American adoption experience to be on its top 20 list for 2018. The site provides recommendations for books “written by adoptees themselves.” The website celebrates the totality of the adoptee voice and experience, noting “we believe adoptees have a unique perspective on life in general.”
I am delighted my work, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, is recommended. The authors and works picked showcase a wide spectrum of adoptee experiences in the United States.
The list features a diverse collection of works and authors, including Korean-American adoptee authors Nicole Chung, J.S. Lee, and Julyanne Lee, as well as books on the language of adoption, by Karen Pickell, and on famous adopted persons, by Alice Stephens. My narrative nonfiction work mixes my life story and journey to justice and a critical look at the adoption system as a public health, political, and sociological and historic issue tied to the harmful treatment of illegitimately born persons.
Rudy Owens’ memoir on the American adoption experience
Adoptees number more than 5 million Americans, and they provide a rich diversity of voices that is frequently drowned out and ignored in the larger national discussions of the U.S. adoption system. The continued publication of poems, novels, historical accounts, and nonfiction works like mine, which combines memoir and a critical and detailed study of that system, are slowly helping to change how the country, the media, and the public think about this incredibly diverse group and their collective experience.
The one unifying theme that binds U.S. adoptees is having been raised by people who were not their biological parents. U.S. adoptees may be born overseas, be raised in transracial familial settings, be foster-raised persons, or be persons raised by kin such as a grandparent. Or they may be like me, a person who is the product of one of the least-understood social-engineering experiments in U.S. history, which separated millions of families in the three decades after World War II.
I encourage you to order my book for the holiday season to learn more about the importance of kin relationships in the raising of children, the political landscape that denies most adoptees their legal rights, and the history of a system that encouraged single mothers to relinquish their illegitimately born kids to address societal fears of stigma and illegitimacy.