Product Description

A reissue of the classic 1975 memoir that Elie Wiesel called "deeply stirring…important and enriching."

In this significant and lasting account, Betty Jean Lifton, acclaimed author of several books on the psychology of the adopted, tells her own story of growing up at a time when adoptees were still in the closet. Twice Born recounts her early struggle with the loneliness and isolation of not knowing her birth parents; her identification, as a journalist in the Far East, with the orphans left behind by American soldiers in Japan and Vietnam; and the guilt she experiences over what feels like a betrayal of her adopted parents as she sets off on a forbidden quest to find her roots.

With the mounting suspense of a detective novel, Twice Born explores the difficulty of searching for one's past when records are sealed, and the complexity of reuniting with a birth mother from whom one has been separated by both time and social taboos. More than a vivid and poignant memoir, Lifton has given us a story of mothering and mother-loss, attachment and bonding, secrets and lies, and the human need for origins.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #826349 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-19
• Released on: 2006-09-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 296 pages

Review
"A personal account of the painful problems caused by the adopted child's aloneness among his or her contemporaries and the need (often supressed) to know of, even to find, the biological parents." --The New York Times Book Review

"Deeply stirring...important and enriching." --Elie Wiesel

"Twice Born is an eloquant book." --Psychology Today
-- Review

Review
California Bookwatch

The author's written several books on the psychology of the adopted, but here provides her own autobiographical experience, telling of a life where adoptees were still kept in the dark about their identification.... Twice Born: Memories of an Adopted daughter traces her journey and feelings.

Reference and Research Book News

At the time she was told her birth parents were dead and she was adopted, Lifton was seven and sick from scarlet fever. The timing could not have been worse. The experience itself caused significant problems for Lifton, and the questions about her birth parents lingered for decades. Finally she found her birth mother was alive and to ease her pain and answer questions Lifton sought and found her. Her search for her birth father had less success, but Lifton found the questionshad eased and she was able to "re-enter" life, finally, as what she felt was herself. Lifton...adds new insights from the changes in adoption practices to her 1975 original and makes a case for open adoption records.

About the Author
Betty Jean Lifton, Ph.D., is a writer, psychotherapist, and leading advocate for adoption reform. Her books include Journey of the Adopted Self, Lost and Found, and The King of Children, a New York Times Notable Book. A frequent lecturer, she has an adoption counseling practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City.

Customer Reviews

A powerful memoir that should not be generalized
This is a truly moving book with poignant descriptions of Lifton's suffering as a child. She was adopted at age 2-1/2, told of her adoption at age 7 and warned by her harsh and controlling adoptive mother never to tell anyone, especially her father, that she knew the secret. Lifton grew up with the poisonous idea that an adopted child is the product of an "evil deed that hangs over most adoptions." The little girl was told that her natural parents were dead, which was a lie. It is easy to see how the adult author of Twice Born came to the view that a person is "fragmented" as long as she lacks a link with biological kin, that an adoptee is forced out of the natural flow of generational continuity, as others know it, and feels as if having been forced out of nature itself. Seen in these terms, adoptees become impotent creatures who have been denied free will. I am very moved by the story but want to say that this is the voice of one adoptee whose experience we should take careful note of but at the same time refrain from universalizing. Not all adoptees are raised by such harsh and emotionally vacant parents and also never had adopted friends with whom to discuss things. I am an adoptive mother of a daughter whom we adopted at age 4 days and who grew up into a contented, strong-willed and self-reliant young lady. Of course, we told her of her adoption, but she was not interested in searching for her natural parents. Unlike Lifton who as a toddler had experienced separation, loss, grief, mourning...going from mother to Infant's Home to Foster Home to Adoptive Home, our daughter and the other adoptees in our neighborhood were spared such miseries. Luckily, our birthmother looked for us and today we have a wonderful relationship with her and her family. Our daughter, however, does not feel she changed since meeting her birthmother, or that she became "whole" as if she had been fragmented before. Several of her neighborhood adoptee friends are also not interested in searching and consider themselves well-adjusted adults and parents. I wonder whether Lifton would have become a happy adoptee if she had been raised by loving and honest adoptive parents. Unhappily, when she found her natural mother and the link with biological kin was made, she discovered that now she "had two mothers instead of one, but since both had disappointed me, I had none." Yes, the bitter search for one's roots may take one to an empty place. It seems that the impulse of the adoptee to find the original mother, an urge traceable through the ages, exists as a force independent of the desired object, and continues even when the object has been found. Gisela Gasper Fitzgerald, author of ADOPTION: An Open, Semi-Open or Closed Practice?

Excellent writing in an adoptee's view of adoption
One thing's for sure: BJ Lifton can write. And she understands adoption intimately. This book really tells it like it is, from relinquishment to long after the reunion. As a birthmother, I found "Twice Born" an extremely valuable look into the mind of the adopted person.

Enlightening
In this wonderful volume, BJ Lifton conquers the ghost territory known only to members of the adoption triad--adopted children, birth parents and adoptive parents.

That is to say, each member of the triad traverses the adoption journey haunted, as it were, by spirits of "would have's" "could have's" and "should have's"---those beings they imagine they could have had, or been--- if only their birth parents had raised them, if only they had not forsaken their birth children, if only they could have born biological children themselves.

At the time this book was first published, in 1973, this topic was still quite taboo. Adoptive children were supposed to be grateful for the new lives they had been given and never to look back, just as birth parents were supposed to give their children to those better suited to raise them than they, and as adoptive parents were to raise their new children and never reflect on the ones they might have had, if only....

But for all three members of the triad, and especially for the children, the ghost beings---who they might have been, and who their birth parents might have been---are powerful psychological forces with which, even today, the educational, medical and psychological communities are all too unfamiliar.

People assume that adoptive children (barring illnesses of any kind) will develop in the same ways as all other children, but as BJ Lifton shows us from her own upbringing, this is far from true. Such children carry other beings with them, secret selves, and secret birth parents, who live in their imaginations, and whom they need to discover and meet in order to develop a complete sense of self.

Herein, Lifton offers readers the very daring, candid observations she made concerning her own journey through self-discovery, the process of determining what it means to be adopted, and what it means to each and every adopted child to discover the biological roots from which they hail.

This book is superbly written, and should be required reading not only for adoptive parents, but for all members of the educational, psychological, social services and medical communities who ever come in contact with adopted children. Reading it was truly enlightening.

--Alyssa A. Lappen