My Secret Life
Saturday, January 3, 2009
By ELLEN ULLMAN
Published: January 1, 2009
The New York TImes
I AM not adopted; I have mysterious origins.
I have said that sentence many times in the course of my life as an adopted person. I like it so much I put it into the mouth of a character in the novel I’m writing. The character and I are both fond of the idea. We can think of ourselves as living in the dense pages of 19th-century fiction, where one’s origins — the exact mother and father — are not nearly as important as one’s “circumstances.”