Story for the Week
Every year around the holidays, I see discounts on DNA test kits. They’re a great stocking stuffer, nice conversation starter, yada yada yada.
Dennis had always told us that he was Chinese, Indian, and British…that his paternal grandfather was born in Hong Kong. After Dennis passed, I remember having a conversation with my brother-in-law, who lives with us, who said he never heard that they were Chinese. He was told that their grandfather’s family had immigrated to Hong Kong. I was surprised since Dennis had always been adamant, but my brother-in-law pointed out that out of all of the ethnicities Corinne and Dennis were mistaken for, Chinese was never mentioned. He had a point.
Corinne had always expressed interest in doing a DNA test, so a couple years ago, I decided to place an order with Ancestry.com. Obviously, it would have been great if we had done it before Dennis passed away, but I told Corinne that we would be able to tell a lot of what she got from her father’s side because it wouldn’t necessarily show up on my side. I mean, my family is very Eastern European, so there was bound to be some crossover, but Chinese definitely wouldn’t be it.
So we took the tests. Corinne was an expert spitter considering the months she spent spitting into test tubes for COVID testing at school back in 2020/2021. I, on the other hand, had to retake the test three times. 🙄 The first time, they weren’t able to extract enough DNA from my sample, so they sent me a new kit. The second time, they had trouble analyzing the DNA from my sample. They sent me a third kit.
Now mind you, they didn’t charge me for the replacement kits. Before I did anything with the third kit, though, I called them to ask what I could be doing wrong because I know the third time isn’t always a charm (When You Wonder If the Third Time’s a Charm). They suggested brushing my teeth, rinsing with mouthwash, waiting 45 minutes, and then doing the sample.
That one seemed to work, but then I waited…and I waited…and I waited. Ok, maybe it just felt like forever, but Corinne and I sent in the original samples in January, and it was September. I was tired of waiting.
Obviously without having the DNA for all of our relatives, it’s impossible for these companies to identify exactly where you come from. For example, we always heard that Mom was pretty much 100% Polish and that Dad was mostly German with a whole host of other European ethnicities. My DNA test didn’t show a speck of German, but it does seem to indicate that 36% of the 80% Polish in my DNA is from my dad’s side of the family. Since one of my aunts on my dad’s side shares 28% of my DNA, I would have to think Ancestry might be right. 🤷🏼♀️ I mean, there might still be German on Dad’s side of the family…just not enough to make it to me.
And for Corinne, with her dad’s claim to be Chinese, Indian, and British? Her highest percentage is 35% Polish (no surprise there). Next highest at 10% is India (mix of Southern and Northern, also no surprise). Chinese? I’m shocked…shocked, I tell you, that she doesn’t look Chinese with her whopping 3% of Chinese DNA! 🤣 Seems there might be something to my brother-in-law’s claim that Dennis’s family is not mainly Chinese at all.
So what else do they claim our DNA can tell us? Ancestry lists 89 traits and your likelihood of having them. Corinne and I apparently share 45 of those 89 traits, which makes sense since we share 50% of our DNA. But clearly there is room for improvement on the likelihood of traits.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s all in good fun. It is pretty cool to see matches to family I know of and potentially discover more distant relatives that I still might never meet. At least mine hasn’t provided any surprises like the main character in the book reviewed below. The author based her fictional story on a true story told to her by a friend who discovered from a DNA test that her father, who had already passed away, was not her biological father.
It’s a great story about family ties and how we might identify who we are by our origins…and what happens when those origins turn out to be something we never expected.
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
4 Stars for Little Pieces of Me by Alison Hammer
400 pages
Publisher: William Morrow
Publication Date: April 13, 2021
Purchased on Amazon.
Publisher’s Description
When Paige Meyer gets an email from a DNA testing website announcing that her father is a man she never met, she is convinced there must be a mistake. But as she digs deeper into her mother’s past and her own feelings of being the odd child out growing up, Paige begins to question everything she thought she knew. Could this be why Paige never felt like she fit in her family, and why her mother always seemed to keep her at arm’s length? And what does it mean for Paige’s memories of her father, a man she idolized and whose death she is still grieving?
Back in 1975, Betsy Kaplan, Paige’s mom, is a straightlaced sophomore at the University of Kansas. When her sweet but boring boyfriend disappoints her, Betsy decides she wants more out of life and is tired of playing it safe. Enter Andy Abrams, the golden boy on campus with a potentially devastating secret. After their night together has unexpected consequences, Betsy is determined to bury the truth and rebuild a stable life for her unborn child, whatever the cost.
When Paige can’t get answers from her mother, she goes looking for the only other person who was there that night. The more she learns about what happened, the more she sees her unflappable, distant mother as a real person faced with an impossible choice. But will it be enough to mend their broken relationship?
************
Main Characters:
- Paige – 43-years-old, born on her dad’s birthday, grew up closer to her dad than her mom, they share a birthday, still a little lost following her dad’s death in a car accident two years prior, recently laid off from her job in advertising, planning her wedding to Jeff
- Margaux – one of Paige’s best friends, works as a lawyer, had always been told her European ancestry was French but her DNA told her otherwise
- Max – the other of Paige’s best friends, originally from Ukraine, reality shows about family drama are one of his guilty pleasures, programmed the Jaws theme song as the ringtone for Paige’s mom in her phone
- Jeff – Paige’s fiancé, “as un-Jewish as a man can get,” he and Paige met at a bar that they both got dragged out to about a month after Paige’s dad died
- Elizabeth/Betsy – Paige’s mom, went by Betsy in college, married her boyfriend Mark and dropped out of college when she got pregnant with Paige, has always been pretty straightlaced and serious
- Aunt Sissy – Elizabeth’s best friend since they were in college together, more loose and fun-loving than Elizabeth
- Annabelle and Frannie – Paige’s twin sisters who are on the verge of turning 30
- Andy – an artist with a gallery in Miami; Paige’s “DNA dad”; attended college with Mark, Elizabeth, and Sissy; was the only Jewish athlete on the football team and had a reputation to keep up even though he just wanted to keep to himself
Paige Meyer’s life is kind of the definition of a midlife crisis. She always had a special bond with her dad Mark, who died tragically in a car accident two years ago, 10 days after their shared birthday. Three weeks ago, she got laid off from her advertising job. And two months out from when she is supposed to get married (per her mother’s planning), she has yet to pick the weekend because she would really rather just elope.
The icing on the cake? She just received an e-mail from FamilyTree, the company she and Margaux used for DNA tests a few years ago, indicating a “new leaf”—a parent-child leaf. The site claims that 63-year-old Andrew Abrams is her biological father. 😲
This was just the first 40 pages of Alison Hammer’s Little Pieces of Me, and there’s a whole lot to unpack in the rest of the book. The story alternates perspectives between Now and Then. We start in the current day in the first person from Paige’s point of view.
This story dives into the idea of how much our identity is wrapped up in the people who raise us. What makes a parent a parent? And who am I if I am not my parents’ child? That’s a heavy topic at any age, but after 43 years, I would imagine it’s a tough thing to wrap your head around. Paige has the support of her friends and her fiancé, but her mom is about as stand-offish on the topic as she has been Paige’s entire life. Kind of hard to learn the truth when Mom won’t ’fess up.
Interspersed with Paige’s chapters are third-person narratives from Elizabeth’s (as Betsy) and Andy’s perspectives. The back-and-forth really kept the story moving because as we’re reading about Paige’s struggles to come to terms with the idea, we as readers know the truth. And I really wanted to get to the part where Paige finds out everything.
Not gonna lie, as much as I appreciate why Elizabeth keeps the secret, I really dislike how she handles everything when Paige confronts her. BUT that’s what makes the whole thing so realistic. DNA tests weren’t a remote possibility in the 1970s when Elizabeth was in college. She had no reason to think she wouldn’t take the secret of Paige’s conception to her grave.
Family dynamics play a huge role in this story. Paige has always felt different from the rest of her family, never really felt close to her mom, thinks Aunt Sissy would have been more fun as a mom. Elizabeth (as Betsy), in the Then chapters, wishes she could be more like her outgoing and care-free best friend. And Andy lives in constant fear and just wishes he could be who he is versus the person everyone around him expects him to be.
Hammer mentions in her acknowledgements that this book was based on a conversation she had with a friend who found herself in this situation. The entire back story is fiction, but the idea behind it—discovering as an adult that your biological father is a total stranger to you—was a very real situation. And it makes for a great book.
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