“The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption” (Dutton 2023) by Shannon Gibney.
That intriguing title holds a lot of information. And yes, it’s genre-bending. Shannon Gibney is a mixed race (white and African American) girl, adopted as an infant into an upper middle class white family in the Detroit area. She has two white brothers, Ben who is younger and Jon who is older. She feels loved by her family, but very much the odd man out.
The timeline bounces around. We hear from ten-year-old, then the nineteen-year-old Shannon Gibney who the author portrays as a difficult bright child. We also hear from the 44-year-old Shannon.
We also hear from Erin Powers, Shannon’s birth name, which is part of the speculative aspect. Erin is born to Patricia Powers, and the author invents the life she might have led, had she been raised by her single mother surrounded by a large loving Irish Catholic family in Utica, New York. Erin has a best friend, Essie who is Hispanic.
The real Patricia writes letters to Shannon’s mother, Sue, mostly warning Shannon of an inheritable, rare breast cancer. Excerpts of these letters are published in the book. Shannon meets Patricia when she is nineteen years old, and they have an on again off again relationship until Patricia dies of breast cancer in her forties.
Patricia has told Shannon that her African American father, Boisey Collins, was brilliant and interested in physics. Shannon eventually finds records of Boisey, specifically that he was killed in a high-speed police chase in California when Shannon was six years old. In the meantime, both Shannon and Erin have “met” their father, briefly, due to the “wormhole” that Boisey created with his collider time machine.
Sometimes the author changes from third person to first person in mid paragraph. This makes the narrative clearer rather than more confusing. Occasionally a long passage is repeated, and this, interestingly, serves to show us the difficulty of being raised outside of and ignorant of your birth culture. Shannon is mixed and light skinned, but there’s that one-drop-rule: if you are Black at all, you are Black. She’s not only an outsider in her family but at her school.
As a young adult, Shannon has an article accepted for publication in an anthology. In the article Shannon points out some racist dialogue within the Powers family. Before publication Shannon thinks that Patricia might be interested in reading it. Patricia is livid and denies that the racist things about Mexicans were ever said. Shannon withdraws her article to honor her mother, although it would have been her first publication in the career she aspires to. Nevertheless, Shannon and Patricia’s relationship never fully recovers.
There’s so much food for thought in this ground-breaking speculative memoir which is, rightly, cataloged as fiction. With its adoption documents, family photographs, and medical records, this book is a fascinating dive into adoption as well as racism. It has the distinction of being granted a 2024 Printz Award Honoree.
Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning books: Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore. Her forthcoming books are about women’s suffrage, Martha Graham, Ella Fitzgerald, as well as poems about waterfowl. talesforallages.com
