Hidden Girls: A Birth Mother's Story of Reunion & Reckoning by Julia MacDonnell

Description: Hidden Girls by Julia MacDonnell Estimated delivery 3-12 business days Format Paperback Condition Brand New Description When Julia MacDonnells relinquished son found her just a few years after Massachusetts opened its sealed adoption records to adult adoptees, she was jubilant. Not only would he forgive her for signing away her parental rights to him nearly a half century before, hed join his much younger half-siblings in a big happy blended family. Shed be able, at long last, to emerge from the secret that had controlled more than two thirds of her life. But that is not what happened. Hidden Girls: A Birth Mothers 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 shed relinquished as a teenager reached out to her via email after nearly 50 years. Mad with grief when they took him away, shed kept the secret required by her parents in order to come back home. Shed accepted this humiliation and degradation as a kind of penance, a necessary offering. That is, until her sons 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 whod lost their babies to secret adoption in the decades after World War II. Her story reflects the centurys 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 mothers story and a story that is completely unique to the author. --Marylee MacDonald, Surrender: A Memoir of Nature, Nurture and Love Author Biography Julia MacDonnells long and varied writing career includes journalism and essays; book reviews; a short story collection and two novels in addition to her hybrid memoir, Hidden Girls, for which she was award a 2024 artists fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. MacDonnells 2021 story collection, The Topography of Hidden Stories, won the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award. The author and critic Joan Mellen called it, "a triumph of imaginative grace worthy of Alice Munro. I love this book." 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 Suzannes family. Details ISBN-13 9798350956672 Title Hidden Girls Author Julia MacDonnell Format Paperback Year 2024 Pages 200 Publisher Bookbaby GE_Item_ID:168982672; About Us Grand Eagle Retail is the ideal place for all your shopping needs! With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and over 1,000,000 in stock items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! Shipping & Delivery Times Shipping is FREE to any address in USA. Please view eBay estimated delivery times at the top of the listing. Deliveries are made by either USPS or Courier. We are unable to deliver faster than stated. 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Price: 18.28 USD

Location: Fairfield, Ohio

End Time: 2025-02-10T14:56:31.000Z

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