Janine Veto’s Unknown Bodies: Mothers Daughters and Adoption is a brutally and beautifully honest story that begins on a suburban Chicago playground when her playmate calls her bastard. Until then she thought being adopted was happily special. Her life had been privileged, secure and typically 1950s American: Dad, mom, brother, church on Sunday, lakeside summers in northern Wisconsin. Suddenly Veto felt she was misplaced. The need to find her so-called real parents grew. It was a need that would take decades as well as drive, cunning, a little thievery, and a lot of spunk. It also was a need fueled by alcohol, sex, and disillusion. Set in the arts and philanthropy worlds of Chicago and New York as well as Iowa farm country, a Denver sports bars and a Midwestern university town, it is memoir of a Boomer in search of her identity in the rapidly changing landscape of what it means to be adopted in America. Even as an adopted child, Janine Veto knew there were big pieces missing from her jigsaw life. In setting out to find her birth mother, she inadvertently stumbled on a lost tribe. She is fierce in pursuit, undaunted in courage, and absolute in love. In this gripping memoir, she delivers a meditation on what it means to claim your place in the human family, and what it costs to be made whole.
- Jean Feraca, author of I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio [email protected].
Janine Veto was the girl I would have pitied when I was growing up, the adopted one, illegitimate child so many of us, the ones with imaginations and feelings of unworthiness, feared we might be too. This remarkable, strong-willed, deeply intelligent, life-smacked woman delivers an insider’s story that unfolds like the best mysteries that won’t let you put them down. Unknown Bodies: Mothers Daughters and Adoption , is moving and funny, honest, and smart. Read it. -Beverley Donofrio, author of Riding in Cars with Boys and Looking for Mary
Janine Veto writes about adoption from the inside out. Herself an adoptee, she is also the mother of an adopted Chinese daughter. Born of a single woman in a time when pregnant single women had to hide, she recounts her struggles to find her birth mother and thus reclaim a lost shard of her identity. A memoir that is at once moving, compelling, and a page-turner.
-Emily Prager, author of Wuhu Diaries
Whether intended or not, Janine Veto’s compelling memoir is a vivid study of the nature/nurture argument, demonstrating the impact of both. Despite her middle-class upbringing, Veto drifts into behaviors that are clearly mirrored in the natural mother and father she finds. As an added fill-up, her multi-layered story is also that of an adoptee who, as a gay single woman, adopts a girl from China.
- Lorraine Dusky, author of hole in my heart
