"Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb.
The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you - and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something 'is' missing.
That isn't of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.
The are markings here, raised like welts. Read them. Read the hurt. Rewrite them. Rewrite the hurt.
It's why I am a writer - I don't say 'decided' to be, or 'became'. It was not an act ofwill or even a conscious choice. To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson's story I had to be able to tell my own.
Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out."
"Adoption is outside. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. It is impossible to believe that anyone loves you for yourself."
"We were matched in our lost and losing. I had lost the warm safe place, however chaotic, of the first person I loved. I had my name and my identity. Adopted children are disloged. My mother felt that the whole of his life was a grand dislodgement. We both wanted to go Home."
"My own vicious disagreeable creature liked me writing 'The Battle of the Sun" She and I started talking. She saig, 'No wonder Deb left you - why would she want to be with you? Even your own mother gave you away. You are worthless. I am the only one who knows it but you are worthless.'"
"What I had to understand is that you can be a loner 'and' want to be claimed. We're back to the complexity of life that isn't this thing or that thing - the boring old binary oppositions - it's both, held in balance. So simple to write So hard to do/be."
"I am trying to avoid the miserable binary of 'this means so much to me/this means nothing to me'. I am trying to respect my own complexity. I had to know the story of my beginnings but I have to accept that this is a version too. It is a true story but it is still a versions."
