Title I Must Have Wandered: An Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls
Author Mary Ellen Gambutti
Genre Memoir
Book Blurb
Travel with the author on her quest for identity in her compelling collage hybrid memoir. In a wealth of creative non-fiction prose, archival letters, and photos, she portrays an abandoned newborn girl adopted by an Air Force couple in post-World War II South Carolina. Her adoptive father’s career as an Intelligence officer, his demands for model behavior and discipline, his absences, and family transience during the 1950s and the turbulent 1960s feed the sensitive adoptee’s fear, anxiety, and identity confusion. When the need to know her full life story surfaces at forty, she must rely on adoptee rights advocates to break the barrier of sealed records and launch the search for her birth mother and kin. Decades later, with DNA self-discovery, she embarks on a parallel journey of self-discovery. She triumphs over adversity, gaining a wealth of family and true heritage. She has rendered the tangle of loss and privilege in deeply personal, lyrical language.
(The Second Edition ebook features an image gallery, bibliography, and updated resources.)
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Author Biography
Mary Ellen was abandoned at birth and adopted at one year by a military couple in post-World War II South Carolina. Transfers disrupted her early childhood; each push to leave dislodged the wound of separation. She gains strength in her love of music, words and writing, and gardens. In recovery from a major stroke at mid-life, and through the ensuing years, her writing practice and love of literature have sustained her. Her essays have been published in many literary journals, and she has authored several memoirs. Mary Ellen and her husband live in coastal New Jersey.
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