Found

February 14, 2011
Expanding on her previous titles (Blackbird; Still Waters), in which she related the traumatizing experiences of being adopted twice before reaching her teen years, Lauck begins her story a decade later. After years of therapy, Buddhist practice, her brother's suicide, two failed marriages and motherhood, she rejects her old vision of comparing the past to "radioactive waste" that must be buried. Despite early indifference to finding her birth mother, Lauck comes to see the woman as key to releasing deep pain, sadness, and rage. Lauck's spare narrative concentrates on emotion, occasionally expanded with clinical explanations of mother-child bonding and Buddhist perspectives on inner growth. But she shines when she allows the abandoned child to peek out. Lauck searches out her birth mother and finds her deceased birth father's family, completes the circle, then moves on. People who have struggled for a sense of belonging or with anger and grief will find wisdom, comfort, and guidance in Lauck's discoveries.

January 15, 2011

Sequel to the author's bestselling memoir Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found (2000).

The child of young parents compelled to give an infant daughter up to adoption in the early 1960s, Lauck begins by returning to material from her earlier memoir: her treatment at the hands of careless adoptive parents, years of being shuttled from one reluctant relation to another, the complex relationship with a half brother and horrifying experiences of sexual and emotional abuse. Here she focuses on how the knowledge of being adopted informed those early experiences and shaped the course of her failed first marriage. While the author had searched for her birth parents, and her mother especially, before the birth of her own children, the arrival of her son set in motion a larger spiritual journey to discover her identity as a woman, mother, wife and human. She studied Buddhism and struggled to save her marriage, eventually recognizing that her need to know herself contributed to the failure of a relationship with a good man. She navigated the arcane system of state adoption law and finally, with the help of a private detective, located her birth mother in Reno, Nev. The most interesting parts of the narrative describe that complex and belated parent-child relationship, which may not have resulted in any particular intimacy but did heal some of Lauck's most important psychic wounds. However, the narrative is overly cool and analytical, and the author averts her gaze from some of the most difficult and raw parts of such a history--perhaps in deference to the privacy and feelings of her natural birth family, who never emerge as fully developed characters. The result is a story that never quite compels, despite the thoughtful writing and occasionally powerful moments of emotional honesty.

A memoir of a woman's journey to find her birth parents that provides some interesting reflections on the institution and emotional experience of adoption but keeps the reader at arm's length.

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