If You Could See Me Now
Описание книги
When Michael Mewshaw receives a call from a stranger who says she has reason to believe he is her biological father, Mewshaw realizes he has been half dreading, half hoping for this to happen for over thirty years. Just like the young woman who wants to find the last piece to the puzzle of her life, he thinks it’s possible that in the same process he will discover the answer to questions that have plagued him for decades. But first he has to make sure that she is who she claims to be.In this fascinating memoir, Mewhsaw confronts his own past, the chaos of his family, and complicated memories of the woman he once loved who went on to success as an ambassador, Under Secretary of State and a member of one of America’s most influential families. His unusual role in the baby’s birth, her adoption and, now, her search for her biological parents sets the stage for a revealing personal odyssey that offers a quest for identity and a journey of discovery, an obsession with recapturing the past and righting old wrongs, the constant potential for disappointment balanced against the possibility of redemption. As he finds his old flame and her old lover, rediscovering who he was and who he has become, he finds his life enriched in the process.
Оглавление
Michael Mewshaw. If You Could See Me Now
Copyright etc
book one. C h a p t e r O n e
C h a p t e r T w o
C h a p t e r T h r e e
C h a p t e r F o u r
C h a p t e r F i v e
book two. C h a p t e r S i x
C h a p t e r S e v e n
C h a p t e r E i g h t
C h a p t e r N i n e
C h a p t e r T e n
C h a p t e r E l e v e n
C h a p t e r T w e l v e
C h a p t e r T h i r t e e n
book three
C h a p t e r F o u r t e e n
C h a p t e r F i f t e e n
C h a p t e r S i x t e e n
C h a p t e r S e v e n t e e n
C h a p t e r E i g h t e e n
C h a p t e r N i n e t e e n
Отрывок из книги
One crystalline spring evening in London a long-distance call interrupted our dinner. My wife, Linda, and younger son, Marc, then sixteen, looked on as I answered the portable phone we kept near the table. Although my end of the conversation consisted mostly of monosyllables, they sensed something was wrong. They must have seen it on my face and heard the tightness in my voice. They both stopped eating and stared at me so strangely that I had to turn away from their inquiring eyes.
The call came from my sister Karen, who lives in Maryland, not far from where we grew up. My mother, now in her eighties, has a house a few blocks away from Karen, so in recent years, whenever my sister phones, I've found myself bracing for bad news. But what she had to tell me this time didn't fall neatly into the category of bad or good news, and although it caught me off guard, it had about it the sort of inevitability that attaches itself to events that you realize you've been waiting for, half in dread, half in hope, for decades.
.....
"My father's dead,"Amy said. "But my mother'll speak to you. I'll call and tell her she'll be hearing from you. In the meantime, won't you please let me know something about you and my biological mother? You can't imagine how hard it is not to know anything about yourself. "
Like Karen, I had a powerful urge, an almost irrational impulse, to tell Amy whatever she wanted to hear. It would be a coldhearted person who could resist helping her. Still, I held back. Hard experience had taught me caution. While as a writer I've been accused of grubbing around in people's lives, tweezing up details for my fiction or violating the privacy of friends and strangers alike for my nonfiction. I, like every author no matter how minor, have suffered intrusions and trespasses that were frightening when not downright dangerous. Nutty readers of fiction often accuse novelists of stealing their life stories and vow revenge. Sources in nonfiction sometimes believe they've been libeled and threaten legal action and physical mayhem.
.....