Bastards: A Memoir

"Searing…explores how identity forms love, and love, identity. Written in engrossing, intimate prose, it makes us rethink how blood’s deep connections relate to the attachments of proximity." —Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree

In the early 1980s, Mary Hall is a little girl growing up in poverty in Camden, New Jersey, with her older brother Jacob and parents who, in her words, were "great at making babies, but not so great at holding on to them." After her father leaves the family, ...