Why I Hate Biographies
Good adopted people do not need to know about their origins, and I so wanted to be good.
An essay on belonging, biographies and Bruce Chatwin.
My friend loves biographies. She often recommends I read accounts of dire lives turned around, the fall and rise of a star, or a tragedy overcome.
But I can’t. Biographies unsettle me. It is not the sweep of grand lives that leaves me undone. It is the minutiae.
In ‘I Always Wanted to Go to Patagonia, ’ a short story by Bruce Chatwin, he describes tiny details of his childhood: a book from his aunt, a wooden camel from his father, and a pink conch shell. Each piece is a talisman, freighted with meaning and connection. Then he says:
“The Chatwins were fanatical sailors.”
Such a small comment. And yet, it all reeks of belonging, of all the pieces of his life fitting together like the internal workings of an old clock.
I have none of those types of memories, no special objects, no touchstones to take me back to another time because I was not there, not in any emotionally tangible way.
It’s an adoption thing. To not be present or in a dissociative state, fragmented and ambivalent.
Nancy Verrier, in Coming Home to Self, talks about growing up with genetic amnesia. You have no reference points for one’s being and no reflection of one’s Self.
She says some adopted people are aware of this (while feeling abnormal). Others, disconnected from emotion and not knowing anything else, may think their experience is normal. In adult adoption circles we call this the FOGG (fear, obligation, guilt, gratitude)
That was me, caught in the gaslighting of closed-stranger adoption.
Not your everyday gas lighting, where one person works to warp another person’s mind.
But a top-down, networked long con so deeply woven into our social and emotional lives that we lack the language to comprehend it fully.
In her paper Adoption Law in New Zealand: the Rights and Well-being of the Child, Catherine Moody argues that genetic determinism dominated adoption law.
“Since most adopted children were ‘illegitimate’, and were therefore considered to come from sinful families, it was believed that the sin would be passed on to the child.”
A complete break was the only answer. Nurture over nature was the only way to save the child from the mother's immorality. …Meanwhile, fathers were actively deleted from birth certificates, invisible and absolved.
That was the adopting parent’s primary job. To wipe out the acquired child’s pre-loaded sin by pretending they were their natural children born into wedlock. It was a big ask. And a big lie.
The lies at the heart of stranger adoption are the cracks where the fogg gets in.
My childhood is like a half-remembered dream. And yet the pressure to stay asleep is immense.
It’s not enough to be an adopted person. You have to be a good adopted person. Good adopted people do not need to know about their origins, and I so wanted to be good.
Because at the edge of the fog is a vast and lonely desert. A place where you do not fully belong anywhere. A place reserved for adopted people when they let down those who worked so hard to nurture them. (see As If The Child Came From My Own Body)
I guess that’s what strikes me about Bruce Chatwin’s writing.
He inhabits his life fully: confident, complete, so immersed in his own story that he never pauses to question his right to it.
And why should he?
He knows, without hesitation, that he owns his story — and by extension, the stories of every Chatwin who came before him.
Chatwin’s work shows that to make sense of a life story, you need an authentic history.
So I avoid biographies.
Not because they are poignant, sad, or dramatic, but because they make me aware of all I missed out on while living a lie and all the years spent performing daughterhood.
As I work to end the rule of New Zealand’s archaic Adoption Act 1955, I think of myself as a salmon swimming upstream, against a torrent of bureaucracy that has defined the lives of adopted people for over 70 years.
I am trying to catch the counterflow, those tiny streams of water within the cascade that help push the beleaguered salmon upstream.
But then, a salmon knows where it comes from. It returns there with eerie accuracy every year.
An adopted person has no such surety of identity. Where do you return to when you don’t know where you come from?
Coming up: The ONE NZ TV ad.
Now available direct from the author - a signed and personalised hardback copy of Tree of Strangers.
I’m not adopted, and for most of my life, I never gave much thought to what adoption truly meant—for those who live it, breathe it, survive it. That changed the moment I discovered the work of Barbara Sumner. Her writing didn’t just open a door—it cracked open a world I had never seen, and once I stepped into it, I couldn’t turn away.
Every time I read Barbara’s words, I’m moved to tears. She doesn't just tell stories—she peels back the layers of silence, shame, and loss that surround adoption, layer after devastating layer. Each time I think, Now I understand!, I read more—and cry more. And with every new piece, I learn something deeper, something more painful, something more human. I feel heartbreak, I feel outrage at the injustices hidden beneath polite silence, and I feel grief for the lives affected by systems so often stacked against the vulnerable.
But here’s the thing: I don’t feel powerless. Because Barbara Sumner is not just a writer—she’s a warrior. A truth-teller. A relentless advocate for those whose voices have been ignored, erased, or rewritten. Her courage to speak the unspeakable and fight the unfixable makes space for others to rise. She doesn't just expose the pain—she transforms it into power.
Barbara empowers me. Her words don’t simply inform; they awaken. They challenge me to think, to care, to act. And even though I am not adopted, her work has changed the way I see the world—and the people in it. That, to me, is the mark of a rare and essential writer. I will never look at a biography the same way.
There is so much empathy and parallel’s when reading the raw heartfelt emotions of the adoptee.
What comes across in this article, is the profound loss, this loss fluid, eternal.
Every day it rear’s its ugly head, in some way, hitting you, that of never belonging,
Leaves you plumbing the depths, a life seared to the marrow from adoption anguish/angst.
Never belonging.
It breaks my heart to read the depth, unfathomable depths of such loss and pain.
Thank you for bringing truthful heartfelt exposure,
to the adoptee’s life of triggers traumas.
Wake up world,
the clarion cry, from all seared by adoption.
Adoption is loss,
Adoption is grief,
a bottomless abyss of sorrow.
To me, a living bereavement.
((((((( warmest hugs ))))))