What's True in The Findlings?

 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. 

"Joanne Wilshin's THE FINDLINGS is an emotional exploration of the impact of adoption on identity. Through its believable and struggling characters, readers are able to understand the complexity of family in all of its forms." IndieReader.com

Available in paperback or ebook on Amazon.

Read "The Findlings Blog" for fascinating background details and for more on Joanne's continued search to find her birthfather's side of her family.

That event is the when I met my birth mother Irene for the first time in maybe thirty-two years. I describe that pretty much as it played out, but from Bibi’s point-of-view.

How about all the stuff going on with my siblings? I made it up. Since I was writing a novel, I had to create conflict. If I’d written a memoir, those conflicts would not be present. A novel HAS to have conflict.

Why then, you may wonder, did I not write a memoir? I chose not to write a memoir because reuniting with birth families is extremely complex emotionally and psychologically. There was no way I could write a memoir without divulging things about my individual family members. Since many of them have died, I did not feel comfortable doing that.

Instead, I wrote it as a novel. The characters are themselves; they are NOT real people. If there are similarities, it is by coincidence.

Given that, what is real, and by real, I mean that it actually, provably happened?

• Meeting my birth mother in Santa Ana, California.
• The poem voice’s poems.
• The letter from my uncle in chapter fifteen. It’s written in pencil.  
• The vacuuming incident.
• The stuff about Interferon.
• Lost and Found.
• That conversation I had with my mom in chapter thirteen.
• Maybe some minute details here and there.

Everything else is fiction.

If you ever meet my siblings, my children, my sisters-in-law, or my nieces, they are not the same people found in the book. They are not characters. They did not do or say the things that occur in The Findlings.