The Sun, Whale Road Review, Hippocampus Magazine, WIRED, and more. She earned a BA and an MA from UCLA. Jackson is the editor of the anthology Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Family and the founder and editor of Severance, a magazine and community for adoptees and individuals who’ve discovered misattributed parentage. She also has a Substack about writing with ADHD.
At Electric Lit Jackson tagged seven memoirs that take "readers deep into the mind-bending and sometimes shattering experience of discovering close family late in life." One title on the list:
Inheritance by Dani ShapiroRead about another entry on Jackson's list.
Memoirist and novelist Dani Shapiro always knew who she was: the daughter of Paul Shapiro and a member of an Orthodox Jewish clan with deep roots. Yether writing often circles a notion that there is something hidden in her history. In her 2013 memoir Still Writing, she wrote, “Secrets floated through our home like dust motes in the air. Every word spoken by my parents contained within it a hidden hard kernel of what wasn’t being said.” In 2016, after a DNA test her husband suggested they take “just for fun” revealed she was only half Jewish, she discovered she was the secret—that her beloved father wasn’t, in fact, her father, that her parents had relied on assistive reproductive technology, and she was the daughter of an anonymous donor. In this beautifully written memoir, Shapiro suggests that secrets and knowledge live within our unconscious, in our bodies, and that learning our truth validates the disquieting voices within us.
Inheritance is among Jeremy B. Jones's seven complicated titles about complicated family histories and Thao Thai's seven books about gripping family secrets.
--Marshal Zeringue