Family Forum / Parenting / Adoption / May 2006

http://www.calendarlive.com/books/reviews/cl-et-book16may16,0,1226765.story?coll
=cl-books-reviews

'If You Could See Me Now: A Chronicle of Identity and Adoption'
Michael Mewshaw
Unbridled Books: 240 pp., $23.95

Review by Bernadette Murphy, Special to The Times

THE lesson aspiring writers learned from the scandal over James Frey's
memoir "A Million Little Pieces" is that it's best to be straight with
your reader. Don't claim you spent three months in jail when it was
less than a day. If there's a lesson to be learned from "If You Could
See Me Now" by Michael Mewshaw it would be: Don't play coy.

Mewshaw, author of 10 novels and five nonfiction books, sets out to
give readers the male point of view on unwanted pregnancy and adoption
with a story from his past: the 1964 birth of a baby girl and her
subsequent adoption. Judging from the way he backs into the tale and
the specifics he fails to relate early on about his role, it seems that
he's purposefully trying to mislead readers, a stance that ultimately
undermines trust in him as a narrator.

ADVERTISEMENT

The book opens with the adopted child, Amy, now a woman planning a
family of her own, who locates Mewshaw in London in order to track down
her medical history - not, she says adamantly, to find a new set of
parents. As he considers how to deal with Amy (she could be trying to
bilk him somehow), he worries about what to tell his nearly grown sons.
What will they think if they know this aspect of his past?

In his first conversation with Amy, Mewshaw grills her on what she
knows about her parentage and how she knows it. Before answering
questions about her mother's identity and confirming he is the father
listed on her birth certificate, he insists that Amy send the
information given by the Children's Home Society in Los Angeles, which
had arranged the adoption.

"Why won't you tell me who you are?" Amy asks in that first phone
conversation, a question on this reader's mind as well.

After that exchange, Mewshaw enters into soulful conversations with his
sons and with his wife, Linda, who, he tells us, "greeted the news not
just with equanimity but with something akin to joy. She had always
wanted a daughter and viewed Amy as a surrogate." Receiving Amy's
documents from Los Angeles, he sees they're legit. He next calls her
adoptive mother to discuss Amy with her, then does research on how
adoptions are facilitated, considers getting in touch with Amy's
biological mother and finally tells Amy the truth he's known all along:
He isn't - and could never have been - Amy's father.

It seems that the woman he was dating at the time (he gives her the
pseudonym Adrienne and tells us she's now a top member of the
Republican Party, a big-name executive who's frequently seen on CNN)
became pregnant by another man before she and Mewshaw had entered into
a sexual relationship. Though Mewshaw stayed with her throughout the
pregnancy and helped arrange the adoption, he's not biologically
related to Amy.

Mewshaw's disingenuousness with Amy is frustrating and makes one wonder
what the author thought he'd gain by withholding these facts. Perhaps
he was trying to heighten narrative tension, to get us more interested
in the tale - a reasonable assumption given that, without creating
the false impression that he is Amy's father, there might not be much
of a story to draw us in. What follows is not what readers might expect
- a narrative focused on Amy and how adoption, even from the
sidelines, shaped Mewshaw. Rather, it's primarily a reiteration of the
torrid affair he had with Adrienne and how he'd desperately wanted to
marry her and was even willing to raise the baby as his own, but she
wouldn't have him.

Later, Mewshaw gives Amy her biological mother's phone number, trying
to facilitate a phone reunion, but Adrienne is not interested; she just
wants to get on with her life and is furious that Mewshaw dragged her
into this triangle. He also helps her contact her birth father, but Amy
feels no connection with him. In the end, readers feel only for poor
Amy, who was simply trying to get her medical history.

For a book that's supposed to shed light on adoption from the male
point of view, a subject that could have been fascinating, it's too bad
that Mewshaw chose to begin this one in shadow and misdirection.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------