A shark in the garden: An adoptee memoir

My current work is centred around the adoptee life narrative, what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson call a genre of life writing. Specifically, I am interested in late discovery adoptee memoir, in which the adopted person describes learning of his or her adoptive status when an adult: the revelation of a long held secret. For the creative non-fiction part of my PhD I am writing my own late discovery adoptee memoir, which I consider to be a form of bearing witness to my experience, which includes living with a mentally ill adoptive parent and being told at twenty-three that I had been adopted. For this paper, I will present extracts from my memoir in an attempt to illustrate the testimonial potential of such writing, and adoptee life writing in particular, and link to the themes of this conference, for my writing, rewriting, and remaking involves the stirring up of many ghosts. Martin Edmond, in his keynote address from the 2014 AAWP Conference, said ‘All writers go back to the dark to feed: going back to the dark to feed is, perhaps, analogous to riding the ghost train’, and my memoir is created from such darkness, where secrets lay waiting to be brought into the light.