The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption

by Shannon Gibney

Overview

A Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book

Part memoir, part speculative fiction, this novel explores the often surreal experience of growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee.

Dream Country author Shannon Gibney returns with a new book woven from her true story of growing up as the adopted Black daughter of white parents and the fictional story of Erin Powers, the name Shannon was given at birth by the white woman who gave her up for adoption. 

At its core, the novel is a tale of two girls on two different timelines occasionally bridged by a mysterious portal and their shared search for a complete picture of their origins. Gibney surrounds that story with reproductions of her own adoption documents, letters, family photographs, interviews, medical records, and brief essays on the surreal absurdities of the adoptee experience.

The end result is a remarkable portrait of an American experience rarely depicted in any form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593112014
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	01/09/2024
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	159,513
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.61(d)
Lexile:	840L (what's this?)
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Shannon Gibney is an author and university professor. Her novel See No Color, drawn from her life as a transracial adoptee, was hailed by Kirkus as "an exceptionally accomplished debut" and by Publishers Weekly as "an unflinching look at the complexities of racial identity." Her sophomore novel, Dream Country, received five starred reviews and earned her a second Minnesota Book Award. The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be earned a Michael L. Printz Honor. She lives with her two Liberian-American children in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Read an Excerpt

The literature of adoption is a fictional genre in itself. Adoptees know it to be generally as fantastical as any space opera—and just as entertaining to the masses.
Every story must begin with the vulnerable but good-­hearted poor birth mother who loves her baby very much but cannot take care of it (the birth father is always conspicuously absent in these narratives). There is a kindly, upper-­middle-­class, usually white couple who desperately wants a child, and have pursued all avenues in order to get one (if the couple is adopting internationally, they are in a rich country in the Global North, and have spent years on various lists, waiting for an available child, many times spending thousands of dollars). They fight, despite all odds, to build their family through adoption, in the process creating a healthy, happy, thriving child who eventually grows into a healthy, happy, thriving adult who has bonded perfectly with their new colorblind family. All this miraculous transformation from a poor, brown, cast-­off orphan. Love conquers all.

Once the birth mother has given up the child, she is no longer part of the story.

Once the child is adopted, there is no talk of loss of first family, culture, language, or community. The adoption is simply a bureaucratic event that happened, and then is over.

Since the birth father was not part of the story from the beginning, he is not part of the adoptee’s story as it progresses.

And if you ask about any of the particularities of this literature of adoption: who is adopting whom, from where to where, what are the racial dynamics of the transaction, the role that money plays, corruption, the trauma of removal, the burden of assimilation, you are branded an angry and maladjusted adoptee.

When most of the literature written about a marginalized group of people comes from white adoptive parents who are psychologists, sociologists, creative writers, and professors who don’t identify themselves as adoptive parents in their “objective” work, what other possible outcome could there be?

This is how I came to understand epistemological violence.

In my body.

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/30/2023

Gibney strikes an intriguing balance between memoir and fantasy in this kaleidoscopic portrait that chronicles both her real-life childhood as Shannon Gibney and an alternate imagined life as Erin Powers, her birth name. After she’s born in January 1975, the biracial protagonist is, in reality, immediately relinquished by her white birth mother and adopted seven months later by white parents Jim and Susan Gibney. But elsewhere—in another dimension that the first-person narrator initially glimpsed through a wormhole in her mirror when she was 10—Erin lives, instead, with her birth mom and maintains close, if at times contentious, relationships with her extended family. What follows is an exploration of the subject’s identity as a transracial adoptee as examined through the protagonists’ differing—and sometimes eerily similar—lives across a nonlinear timeline. Collected letters and photographs from Gibney’s real life feature alongside recursive imaginings of who she might be if Gibney had grown up with her biological family. Asking the question, “Who was that girl, and who is she now?” this richly textured telling fills in the blanks “with scraps of speculation” where personal histories remain unknown. The result is a fantastical, transcendent memory collage that shirks convention in search of what is real and true about familial bonds. Ages 14–up. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

A Booklist 2023 Editor's Choice
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

★ "An ambitiously authentic adoption story where fiction does the work of truth, and archives, correspondence, and health records provide the roots of fantasy."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

★ "A fantastical, transcendent memory collage that shirks convention in search of what is real and true about familial bonds."—PW, starred review

★ "Readers will praise the raw honesty and insight in this lovingly crafted memoir."—Booklist, starred review

"An authentic journey for adoptees who are not allowed to feel sad but thrust into a stance of gratitude for a life they were given and for all readers who, after a loss, are reconstructing their identities."—SLJ

"This deeply felt and unusually creative book is recommended for readers aged fourteen to adult, and will be an especially important resource for people of all ages with a connection to transracial adoption. The final section of the book, a group text thread including the author and other writers with this background, resonates with the solace of shared experience."—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Gibney captures such interior and intimate adoptee feelings. It's so rare to see it evoked on the page. Breathtakingly beautiful."—Kimberly McKee, PhD, author of Disrupting Kinship: Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States

From the Publisher

05/26/2023

Gr 11 Up—Given the enormous amount of literature dedicated to the good fortune or tragic-torn stories of orphans, Gibney hits hard with her part-memoir, part-speculative fiction, pastiche-approach to set the record straight and unravel the everyday pain of growing up biracial, adopted, with people who are not her birth parents. There is rage, there is research, there is speculation of what could be. Gibney tells her own story, with old photographs, letters from Children's Services, unfamiliar artifacts for outsiders (such as a letter of "non-identifying information" about her birth parents), holiday cards from mom, and a detailed family tree. Fans of Girl, Interrupted will be primed for this journey. Some segments are written in strike-through; others analyze pop culture depictions of other adoptees, such as Loki in The Avengers. But throughout the exploratory, experimental text, there is the narrative thread of a young person figuring out the real story, finding a center of truth in a pile of documents, a heroic journey to find home, a place to belong, an endeavor to re-inhabit the lost love of a tragically creative, mentally ill birth father and well-meaning, flawed birth mother. VERDICT An authentic journey for adoptees who are not allowed to feel sad but thrust into a stance of gratitude for a life they were given and for all readers who, after a loss, are reconstructing their identities.—Sara Lissa Paulson

School Library Journal

Shannon Gibney narrates her memoir/speculative fiction with authenticity. Adopted soon after birth by a white middle-class couple, Gibney was 19 when she began to imagine the identity of Erin Rebecca Powers, the person she would have been if she had stayed with her alcoholic birth mother. The references to this audiobook’s protagonist frequently switch from first to third person—even within sentences. All this brings listeners into the disorienting world of Shannon/Erin, who seeks to find herself by imagining the possibilities of a different life and people she has never met. The story reflects the “speculative memoir’s” theme: “There are no singular truths.” Gibney refers to pdfs throughout—pictures, graphs, letters, and documents that do add some concreteness to the story. S.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2023 - AudioFile

Shannon Gibney narrates her memoir/speculative fiction with authenticity. Adopted soon after birth by a white middle-class couple, Gibney was 19 when she began to imagine the identity of Erin Rebecca Powers, the person she would have been if she had stayed with her alcoholic birth mother. The references to this audiobook’s protagonist frequently switch from first to third person—even within sentences. All this brings listeners into the disorienting world of Shannon/Erin, who seeks to find herself by imagining the possibilities of a different life and people she has never met. The story reflects the “speculative memoir’s” theme: “There are no singular truths.” Gibney refers to pdfs throughout—pictures, graphs, letters, and documents that do add some concreteness to the story. S.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2023 - AudioFile

★ 2022-11-16
An ambitiously authentic adoption story where fiction does the work of truth, and archives, correspondence, and health records provide the roots of fantasy.

When she was 19, Shannon Elaine Gibney met Erin Rebecca Powers via a letter from Child and Family Services of Michigan. Yet their existences had already been deeply and intimately interwoven. Shannon was adopted by middle-class White parents Jim and Susan Gibney soon after her birth in 1975, but her alcoholic White birth mother, Patricia Powers, had named her Erin. Narratively, time and space become impressively distorted as Gibney relays autobiographical accounts of Shannon and Erin that complicate her conceptions of self as a transracial adoptee, biracial Black woman, writer, and science-fiction fan. Erin is imagined at dinner tables with extended family whom Shannon would never know well, if it all, facing the racist familial microaggressions she can’t quite avoid in any timeline. Biographical elements are similarly reconfigured: A maternal genetic predisposition to cancer and discovering parts of her Black biological father and his family tree that had all but been erased help flesh out Shannon and Erin in fuller, more embodied ways. Gibney invokes poet Audre Lorde as a sort of third mother, a source of creative inspiration and guidance. As both Erin and Shannon proceed through the spiral wormhole that threads this text together, Gibney offers up the singularly essential connective tissue of a robust and personal body of work.

An innovative and captivating reflection on identity and self. (author’s note, further reading) (Speculative nonfiction. 14-adult)

Kirkus Reviews