Author’s Note

One spring evening nearly twenty years ago, I sat in an old pub in a village on the west coast of Scotland, having a pint with a man I’d met for the first time a couple of hours prior. We held our bodies and our beers in similar ways. I looked like him.

I’d been forewarned, my natural mother having told me shortly after we first met, two years before, that I looked like my natural father. So, I was prepared for that. But the familiar way this stranger moved (later, my mother would tell me she’d also noticed that I walked like him), shook me to my core. I was a close-to-middle aged woman with a family of her own, work, a marriage, what I thought was a solid identity.

Entering into reunion with both of my biological parents, learning them and their stories, their backgrounds, called into question everything I believed about myself. I felt like Wile E. Coyote in that moment after he’s stepped off the cliff and there is one short beat wherein he realizes there’s nothing under him. And then he plummets.

I spent the next few years desperately trying to stuff things underneath me to recreate my foundation, seeking answers to the questions that had taken the place of my sense of self: Who am I and what even makes me who I am? Do I have any real choice or am I just a pile of genetic code? How true is the narrative that we believe about ourselves—the one we are given by the people we grow up amid, by place and time? Can we change it? Insert our own plot twist?

I read everything I could about adoption and its impact. What I discovered was at once shocking and resonant: that adoptees are four times more likely to die by suicide and have higher rates of addiction than the general population, that being removed from your mother causes trauma and that adoption alone does not heal that wound.

I knew I wanted to write about all of this—identity, belonging, the experience of being separated from our biological roots and the landscape of our ancestors, the impact of trauma on identity. I wanted to examine inter-generational grief and the role of relinquishment and adoption in that.

I could have written a memoir, but I wanted something larger (and more compelling) than my own life. So, though I have had many of the experiences that Alison has, this is a work of fiction.

As I worked on this novel, over a period of a decade, elements emerged on the page: Eilidh, for instance, who is a confluence of my longstanding love for and admiration of older women (good thing, since the decades are rapidly ticking past) and some gift of the writerly universe. Vic, who arrived on the page during one predawn drafting session.

I’ve combined some real places and historical figures—Glasgow and Boudicca, for instance—with those of my own imagination—Strathnamurrah, Tursa. I write this so you don’t go haring off looking for somewhere that doesn’t actually exist or think of the novel as part history book.

What I’ve tried to offer in this novel is an exploration and understanding of who we are as individuals and as women, of what causes us to alter our selves for the promise of acceptance and belonging, of how we can connect even over huge gaps in time and geographical distance, and of how we might heal and learn to live full and satisfying lives. I also hope I’ve written a damn fine story, one you’ll return to and share. I do so want Alison, Eilidh, Vic and Mary to be about in the world.

Thank you for giving my words your precious time. I wish for you deep, full-hearted connection with people and place and always the understanding that you do belong, that you can write your own story.