Blood Strangers, a memoir by Katherine A. Briccetti

In her memoir, Blood Strangers, Katherine A. Briccetti takes on the complex, politically-charged and personally confusing question of what constitutes a family and how one’s identity is formed, based not just on ancestry but on the expectations and pressures of society at large about what constitutes legitimacy.

Briccetti sticks to a straightforward, chronological autobiography, describing the pain and confusion of losing her biological father at a young age and gaining a stepfather whom she came to love and identify as “Dad,” then learning that her birth father had started a new family, effectively replacing her. The story then tracks her move as a young woman from the Midwest to San Francisco, her surprise at falling in love with a woman, and her eventual decision to settle in Berkeley and raise children (via sperm donation) with her partner in the mid-1990’s, when same-sex unions were much less known and accepted in the public consciousness. Briccetti spares no one’s mistakes (least of all her own), in her quest to understand the deep feelings of loyalty, guilt, unrequited love, and abandonment she experienced in her relationship with her two fathers, and the schism between the idealized image of a family the larger society holds up versus what typical families are actually like. Briccetti also touches on the unreliability of memory: as a child, she came to believe that her biological father abandoned her and her brother to start a new family. When she discovers as an adult that this is not true, she is forced to reevaluate the “story” she has formed about her identity.

The focal point of Briccetti’s quest for personal understanding of what “blood ties” mean is in researching her genealogy, an interest she develops as a child when shown an incomplete family tree, and which develops into a passion bordering on obsession in her adult life. Discovering that her birth father was adopted, she sets out to find her birth grandmother, despite her birth father’s deep hesitancy. This push to uncover, to no longer tacitly approve the secret-keeping that Briccetti feels was so damaging to her childhood psyche, is also driven by her fear for her own children. Will they suffer from not having a father? Will they grow up feeling damaged by having to constantly justify or internalize their differences from their peers’ more “normal” families, as Briccetti herself did?

Blood Strangers is a fearless exploration of the messy, ambiguous, slapdash way that some families—arguably most families— evolve: divorces, adoptions and secrets are leaves on the tree growing alongside marriages, births, partnerships, reconciliations, and the uncanny mixture of features we inherit by genetics and mannerisms we learn by proximity—all of which contribute to the forming of self and family, and none of which, thankfully, reveal a formula for perfection.

Blood Strangers
by Katherine A. Briccetti (302 pages/Heyday Books, May 2010)

reviewed by LJ Moore editor.moore(at)gmail(dot)com