What happened after that discovery is the compelling story Shapiro tells in her fifth memoir, Inheritance. 'By the time I went to bed that night,' she writes, 'my entire history - the life I had lived - had crumbled beneath me, like the buried ruins of an ancient forgotten city.' The man Shapiro thought was her father was not. The half sister had done a DNA test, too, and when the two sent their results in for comparison, the numbers changed everything: They were 'no kind of sisters,' as Shapiro's husband said upon reading the email. Shapiro was an only child whose parents had both died, but she had an older half sister from her father's first marriage, whom she had never much gotten along with. Given what she knew about her parents' backgrounds, the Ashkenazi percentage should have been much higher, but she shrugged it off. A haunting interrogation of the meaning of kinship and identity, written with stunning intensity and precision-Dani Shapiro's most intimate and compelling work yet.'-Dust jacket.Her results were puzzling: 52 percent Ashkenazi Jewish from Eastern Europe, the rest a mix of French, Irish, English and German. Dani Shapiro's memoir unfolds at a breakneck pace-part mystery, part real-time investigation, part rumination on the ineffable combination of memory, history, biology, and experience that makes us who we are.

It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in, a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years. Inheritance is a book about secrets-secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. In just a few hours of Internet sleuthing, she was able to piece together the story of her conception and, remarkably find a YouTube video of her biological father-his face and mannerisms eerily similar to her own. Over the course of a single day, her entire history-the life she had lived-crumbled beneath her. Summary/Review: 'In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA, Dani Shapiro received the astonishing news that her beloved deceased father was not her biological father.

INHERITANCE: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

Inheritance dani shapiro summary