Remember this Sandra Boynton stationery
from the 80s?

   Readers have asked me if Anna, the poem voice, was real.

    The answer is YES!
 
   That little scene in the last chapter of The Findlings, where Delilah and Bibi discuss Anna, did in fact happened. Not the whole conversation, but that portion where the women argue about the voice’s name, and Delilah reveals who it actually is.

    That single moment continues to be one of the most alarming, revealing, astounding, and beautiful moments of my life. It meant I wasn’t crazy for hearing voices, and it meant that I was being looked after. Imagine that happening to you! The moment was a game changer for me!

In chapter four of The Findlings, the reader is given the first glimpse of Bibi interacting with music. In that chapter, she has more important things on her mind, but Chopin’s "First Ballade" streams through her car’s radio, to her distraction. This piece is important to the entire narrative because it is one of several elements working to break open Bibi’s suppressed memories

 What’s true in the novel The Findlings?

Good question to ask me. My four-word answer: It’s a novel. (By that I mean: It is NOT a memoir.)

But it’s still a good question, especially since lots of you know I found both my birth parents’ families in 1981 and 1991. In fact, some of you were there when I was looking for one or the other, and when I was coming to grips with the ramifications of it all. You know the story. You supported me in ways that shaped my feelings about humanity; you were that wonderful.
Still, it’s a novel that is based on one real event. 

There's a lot of music in The Findlings, and not all of you will recognize every piece by name. So here's some help.

For most of The Findlings, torment understandably festers in the hugely talented Victor’s mind, and, dare I say, his soul. So the music that came to me that would best underscore the state of his mind and life came from composers ranging from Wagner and Schumann to Prokofiev and Stravinsky.

Chapter one ("Her Children were Leaves") sees Victor choosing Wagner’s "Pilgrim’s Chorus" (Tannhauser) to be the soundtrack of his life. It cues the reader to know he is on some form of journey or quest. Here is:

Photo: MemphisFlyer's article about Ronnie Grisanti's Memphis Restaurant.

   In chapter two of The Findlings, Bibi makes Elfo's Special for her family's fated Saturday night dinner.
   My idea for having Bibi make this meal sprang from a cookbook I got for Christmas in 1974: Mary and Vincent Price's A Treasury of Great Recipes. I adored this cookbook because, besides the fact that the recipes weren't all that hard to make, I knew that whatever I made it would be a hit.  

For those of you who plan to read and discuss The Findlings in a book-club setting, you might consider using the following questions as conversation starters:

1. What were some of your initial assumptions about the various characters, and how did those assumptions evolve as your read on?
2. What role did truth and dishonesty play in the lives of the various characters?
3. Whose side did you find yourself taking in chapter two’s family dinner?
4. Why do you think the author chose to have a disembodied narrator who was on a mission?
   

 Meeting my father's two sons took some doing.

First, as you read in a previous post, I had to get confirmation from my birth mother Irene Sargent Nielen that Roscoe Jepson was my father. At that meeting, she also told me my brothers' names: Bill and Peter. (For a thrill, here's the Roscoe Jepson page.) Irene also told me she thought Peter lived in Galveston, Texas, but Bill was still in San Diego.

That done, I called Peter and William Jepson in the San Diego phone book. No luck.

Then I had this very weird experience, which I now

  Does the whole process of healing the adoptee’s wound overwhelm you? Like, when will it ever end?
   I know I felt this way when I found my birth mother ’81 and my birth father in ’91. I’ve had a lot of time to heal, and I’ve come out on the other side, which makes me I feel like a veteran at it. If you’d like to read further, I’ll share 7 thoughts on healing.

It was really weird how I found my father. I wasn’t even looking for him.

In 1991 I kept pretty busy teaching junior high school English and driving my kids to school and soccer games. A dull depression had dogged me for past six months, and I wanted to know what it was about. As I’ve learned to do, I stated out loud that I wanted to know what the depression was about.

It was late December 1981, at LAX.

My sister Cecilia just emerged from the disembarking tunnel. It was the first time I'd ever seen her in the flesh. She has the dark hair, but we both have the curls.

Four months earlier, I'd found her mother Irene, my birth mother, in Santa Ana, California, some ten miles from my home in Huntington Beach.  She was in a convalescent home home getting over something I can't remember. She told me I had a sister.  Cecilia was her name. I'd never had a sister. I was the only girl in a family with two brothers.