Hole in My Heart: Love and Loss in the Fault Lines of Adoption by Lorraine Dusky is a powerful and thought-provoking memoir. Dusky illuminates how traumatic adoption can be, for all involved. She references countless studies and educates on the many ways adoption may affect one's life. Ways that I would have never thought of. Dusky is a skilled storyteller, as painful as telling her story must have been. When I received this book, I looked forward to learning about something I knew nothing about. I was emotionally invested and learned through the entire book. I appreciate Grand Canyon Press and Lorraine Dusky for the LibraryThing giveaways copy. ( )

Great read! My niece is adopted and I heard stories regarding living conditions etc from a poverty stricken country. I also have dear friends that adopted little ones so when I was done reading, I passed along to her.

Hole in My Heart was an extremely interesting and poignant memoir. Lorraine Dusky was the first woman to go public (in the 1970s) about being a mother who had placed her baby for adoption. She's a real trailblazer and her story is fascinating, as well as full of grief and loss.
It's probably hard for the youngest generation to understand the incredible stigma of having a baby out of wedlock, since they are lucky enough to grow up in a time where this is not the case. Dusky makes it understandable by telling her story with a lot of concrete detail. She got pregnant at a moment in time where women were supposed to now be sexually liberated but still basically had no access to birth control, and abortion was illegal, and being an unwed mother would bring shame on your whole family. (She explains that this period of time is called the Baby Scoop era and was the peak of infant adoption in the US. And that it mainly involved white mothers as African-American mothers were better at not placing their babies for adoption and keeping them within the birth family.)

Dusky was a hotshot young reporter who was breaking the glass ceiling for women in journalism. She got swept up in a romantic affair with a fellow reporter who was a married man. She thought she might be pregnant, but had a negative pregnancy test and was examined by a doctor who told her she was not pregnant and put her on the Pill. She eventually realized she was indeed pregnant and got herself to—I think it was Mexico—where she asked around the cab drivers and so forth where she could get an abortion. But the abortionist told her it was too late; she was too far along. Back at home, Dusky abruptly quit her job and hid in her apartment so no one would see she was pregnant, not telling any family or friends, hoping that her married boyfriend would decide to leave his wife and marry her so she could keep the baby, which he did not do. When she surrendered her daughter, she was advised to move on with her life and forget all about her baby, but instead she was filled with lifelong regret and grief. For me, one of the most interesting parts of the story was how Dusky changed from someone who kept this as her dark secret to someone who was able to tell her mother and the entire world that she was a birth mother. (She talks in the book about how unsatisfactory a term "birth mother" is, which I had never thought about before.) Dusky became an activist and a spokesperson and was dead set on finding her daughter someday, despite the fact that the records were 10000% sealed.

I feel fairly au fait about adoption but the one thing that really surprised me about this memoir was the vitriol and abuse from the public, and even just socially, that Dusky had to deal with simply for being a birth mother and for saying publicly that she wanted to find her daughter. This has gotten better--I think?! I've never heard anyone say anything negative about birth parents either in general or specifically (like about their adopted kids' birth mothers.) Maybe these cruel things are now said behind closed doors instead of publicly, but it seems pretty clear to me that Dusky was a prime mover behind the change in societal attitude. I realized that I've read lots of memoirs by adoptees and adoptive parents, but this is the first one I ever read by a birth mother, and that says something. (Novels--that's a different story. So many of the '70s/'80s YA problem novels I read as a kid were about pregnant teens--He's My Baby Now, Unwed Mother, etc. They drove me up the wall because they all had the same ending, the teen parents placed the baby for adoption because they decided they weren't good enough parents. Even in I Want to Keep My Baby! An example of how novels for teens represent societal attitudes and in turn can be propaganda.) Spoilers ahead...

Dusky does end up finding her daughter. At that time there were anonymous searchers that the birth moms could pay a pile of money to and be given the information. Not like the angels today who do it as a public service. Who were these anonymous people? Judges or clerks or others who had access to this secret information. It turns out that while Dusky had been looking for her daughter, her daughter’s adoptive mom had also been looking for her to see if Dusky had any family history information that could shed light on her daughter’s seizure disorder. (She didn’t.)
This section of the book, where Dusky and her teenaged daughter are first getting to know each other, is very sweet and poignant. In the end, however, it’s a very sad story because her daughter always struggled with depression. She herself placed a newborn daughter for adoption. And ultimately died by suicide. Dusky always saw her daughter’s troubles as caused by the adoption and by the birth control pills Dusky unwittingly took while she was pregnant. The adoptive mom saw her daughter’s troubles as caused by her seizure disorder. Just reading the story, I speculated that her troubles were caused by being sexually abused as a child by someone in the family circle and then her adoptive mom did not believe her for some time. You could look at this story through any number of lenses, but part of the sadness of this kind of tragedy is never really knowing why, or if things could have been different. Dusky was very resilient and managed to maintain a good life with her husband despite the death of her only daughter. But who wants to be so resilient? Why can’t humans just have plain happiness? They just can’t.

The one part of the story that Dusky glosses over, in about one sentence, is the death of her mother, who was such a big figure, and when in fact the whole memoir is about mother-daughter relationships. The story of Dusky’s relationship with her granddaughter (who was also adopted) seems like one that is not yet tied up. Overall, I found this memoir to be very thoughtful and affecting.

A couple little things. While I was reading the book, my brother mentioned that his friend Suzanne Bachner, the playwright, knows Lorraine Dusky. Towards the end of the book I turned the page and there was a big picture of Dusky with Suzanne Bachner and her actor husband Bob Brader! They were all in Albany together fighting for New York State to unseal original birth certificates so that adult adoptees could have access to information about their own births. (This law actually was passed in 2020, and this is only the law in a fistful of states.) Also, Dusky talks about reviewing the New York City Ballet’s opening season every night in Saratoga in 1966 for the newspaper she was working for. She should find those reviews and publish them because she witnessed a golden era. I would love to read her fresh eye on Suzanne Farrell, Violette Verdy, Eddie Villella, Karin von Aroldingen, Jacques D’Amboise, Patty McBride, and Patricia Neary. Imagine seeing them night after night—I know they did Midsummer Night’s Dream that season but I don’t know what else—and then getting to describe it to the world, or at least to Albany! I gratefully received a copy of this book via Librarything’s Early Review program.

This book was a thought-provoking take on adoption and the implications to all parties involved. Part memoir, part research, it presented information regarding the complications of adoptions in both anecdptal form and arguments based on research. Although I didn't come to all the same conclusions as the author after reading, this book did expand my understanding of the adoption process and bring to light many issues I had not previously considered. If you want to know about what adoption is like from a natural mother's perspective and hear about the history of adoption-related legislation, I recommend reading this book.

I am a child of a mother who have up my baby sister and I recently found her after 27 years. My mother too was adopted so I get to see all aspects of adoption. Also both were closed adoptions. I will never get to know my mothers biological family. I honestly didn't know what to expect when I first opened this book; however, this book packed all of the feels into very few pages. I applaud you, Lorraine, for sharing your soul with the world. I loved reading about your life and everything that went with it. Thank you for being real. There is no doubt that this author is real in her writing. She discusses what it is like being forced to give up a child for adoption. She discusses the times and the circumstances. Even Hollywood could not portray the vast heartbreak and stigma that these women went through. Lorraine's amazing journey to then find her daughter will leave you breathless. Spoiler alert: They do reunite, but this is true life and not a fairy tale. It is a wonderful thing that Lorraine was able to spend time with her daughter and get to know her. It is a funny thing, a "Mother's Intuition," this intuition is what the driving force was behind Lorraine endlessly searching for her daughter. Lorraine definitely doesn't sugar coat anything in her memoir. She also gives her valid opinion about the world and how the world discusses adoptive versus birth or natural mothers. I found this quite brilliant. She also discusses the lies hidden behind sealed records. The author discusses the issue that sometimes history will repeat itself. As mentioned before, this is not a fairy tale. Lorraine may have found her daughter but the reunion was far from blissful. From there, the roller-coaster of emotions is at its peak. Love, joy, heartbreak, tragedy, family are all found within these pages. I would recommend this book for anyone searching for a loved one who has been adopted. Do not give up hope. It may not turn out to be a fairy tale, but it can be a means of closure. I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.