About this Event
Join host Marcie Keithley as she welcomes Janet Sherlund
ABANDONED AT BIRTH; Searching for the Arms That Once Held Me
Janet Sherlund poignantly captures this journey in her elegant and heart-wrenching memoir, ABANDONED AT BIRTH: Searching for the Arms That Once Held Me (Forefront Books; May 7, 2024). Sherlund paints a vivid portrait of the detachment and longing of an adopted child and the lifelong quest to find her biological mother. It’s an unflinching examination of the grief and trauma caused by this primal separation and the dogged determination it takes to face the forces of opposition—both internal and external—to finally achieve answers.
ABANDONED AT BIRTH illuminates the darker side of adoption, and what it takes to heal. “I hope it starts conversations about the rights of those given away, loss and grief in adoption, the biology of belonging and identity, and why love is not always enough to extinguish the pain,”
Sherlund says. Like many adoptees of her generation, Sherlund was the offspring of teenaged parents. Her mother was forced to have her baby in secrecy. Sherlund would come to learn that her mother was unusual for her time. Not only did she not tell the father she was pregnant, she wanted nothing to do with her baby and never even looked at her newborn.
All Sherlund had to go on when she began her search was a false narrative written about her biological parents by the adoption agency. The twists and turns, setbacks and disappointments, and surprising familial connections finally achieved makes ABANDONED AT BIRTH a page turner of a memoir.
JANET SHERLUND raised her family and served on nonprofit boards in education, health and the cultural arts before writing her memoir, Abandoned at Birth. Her single most significant life event was being given up for adoption at birth. Being adopted undermined her sense of trust and personal value, and impacted every decision she made. It also led to a lifelong quest to find her biological mother, with the hope of finally feeling a tether to this world, a sense of belonging and ultimately, herself. Her memoir fulfills a lifelong dream of raising awareness about loss and grief in adoption, and why it takes more than love to survive that trauma. A graduate of Colgate University, Sherlund lives on the island of Nantucket off the coast of Massachusetts.
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