Birth Mother

I love this post over at Medium.com by Denise Emanuel Clemen, whose short memoir, Birth Mother, was recently published by Shebooks. Birth Mother is an extraordinarily present work that lays bare the toll of sealed adoption on the ones who must relinquish their children in a world that gives them no other choice.

Denise's writing has a subtle power—nothing superfluous yet every detail is given its perfect weight, the sentences spare yet sweeping you into and through the story like a steadily building wave, almost imperceptibly gathering urgency, sorrow, poetry, force, until it breaks against the shore of a teenager's grief, a heart splintered in secret and the shame and broken fury that will forever after define her life.

Here is the editor's description of the book: “In this emotionally detailed memoir of an agonizing year in small town USA, Denise Emanuel Clemen takes us inside the shame, confusion and fear that attended her unplanned pregnancy in the days before Roe v. Wade, when the only options for an unwed teen mother were secret adoption or public disgrace. A shattering portrait of an American era.”

Read Denise's post today at Medium, follow her blog about adoption rights and her own story, then click on over to Shebooks or Amazon and buy her ebook for just $2.99. You'll never look at sealed adoptions or officially invisible birthmothers in the same way again.