{"id":51367,"date":"2013-04-25T15:30:08","date_gmt":"2013-04-25T19:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=51367"},"modified":"2013-04-25T15:08:55","modified_gmt":"2013-04-25T19:08:55","slug":"every-adoption-is-a-ghost-story-an-interview-with-jennifer-gilmore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/04\/25\/every-adoption-is-a-ghost-story-an-interview-with-jennifer-gilmore\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cEvery Adoption is a Ghost Story\u201d: An Interview with Jennifer Gilmore"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"jenSR98x-1-222x300\"<\/a>I first knew of Jennifer Gilmore as the author of two ambitious, warm, hilarious novels (<\/i>Golden Country<\/a>, 2006, and <\/i>Something Red<\/a>, 2010) that, placed side by side, provide an admirably thorough and thoroughly amusing take on the some of the most interesting ideas, inventions, characters, and past-times of the twentieth century\u2014television, immigration, two-in-one cleaning products, radical politics, Joseph McCarthy, cults, and Ian MacKaye.<\/i><\/p>\n

I first met Jennifer Gilmore on an early spring day nearly two years ago when we both went to meet the same writer friend for a late afternoon drink at the same Brooklyn bar where another writer friend bartends every Tuesday. We soon discovered that we are around the same age, live one Brooklyn neighborhood apart, and have many more than two friends in common. That spring, Jennifer was working on her third novel, told from the perspective of a woman trying, and mostly failing, to adopt a child through the byzantine process of domestic open adoption.\u00a0I was about to go back to my twentieth high school reunion, during which I planned to visit the school for pregnant teenagers run by the Salvation Army where I spent the spring of 1989 believing I would release my own daughter to another couple through domestic open adoption. Jennifer and her husband, like the fictional couple in her novel, <\/i>The Mothers<\/a>, released last Tuesday, had already imagined themselves into the lives of many mothers and their children, only to find that the mother had chosen another couple, or decided to parent her own child, or, in the most outrageous cases, was not even pregnant at all. In 1989, I became that kind of mother when, two days after my daughter\u2019s birth, I told the couple I had chosen to be her parents that I planned to do it myself instead.<\/i><\/p>\n

Jennifer had read some of the stories I had written on my own failed adoption when they had appeared in <\/i>Salon (where I was once an editor, and to which both of us have contributed essays). Although we had been on opposite sides of the story, our mutual fascination with what we sometimes referred to as “The Topic” was one of the reasons we became friends. We had both read and thought and obsessed over the tangle of race, class, and politics throughout the institution\u2019s history. We both knew about orphan trains and maternity homes and the Hague Adoption Convention. We also both knew well how sometimes the end of the story could feel like just plain dumb grief all around.<\/i><\/p>\n

Last month, Jennifer and her husband brought home their son. Last week, Jennifer and I met for a late afternoon drink on a early spring day at Lavender Lake, the Brooklyn bar with the name that references the exotically colored Gowanus canal that connects our two neighborhoods, to discuss her new novel, first person vs. omniscient narrators, open adoption and all the intellectual, political, and emotional issues it raises that should be fascinating to anyone at all.<\/i><\/p>\n

Your first two novels were sprawling, multi-generational social sagas: Your first novel, Golden Country, <\/i>took place in your grandparents\u2019 era and covered, among other things, the Jewish-American immigrant experience, World War II, the World\u2019s Fair, and fortunes built on mob life, cleaning products, and the invention of television. Your second novel,\u00a0 Something Red<\/i>, which takes place at the end of the seventies inches closer to your own childhood.\u00a0 That novel dealt with radical politics, the Cold War, and the D.C. straight-edge punk rock scene. <\/b><\/p>\n

The Mothers <\/i> is totally different: it is your first novel narrated in the first-person, and your narrator, Jesse, along with her spouse, is trying to adopt a child through domestic open adoption, as you have also done. You also wrote the novel while you were going through the process of trying to adopt. After so many years of writing your fictional characters from a certain distance, what like to write a character whose experiences veer so closely to your own?<\/b><\/p>\n

If I was going to come closer to myself in this particular trilogy of history, I wouldn\u2019t have chosen this particular book. Given the situation, I just wanted to make my life interesting to myself, as opposed to wanting to blow my head off.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I wanted to write this differently than I have my other books. Otherwise, it would have been written in the third-person, and take place on one of the orphan trains from the past, or something like that and doing what I\u2019ve done previously, which is, in part, illuminating how the past haunts and invigorates the present. It just felt so device-y. You see the gears turning in everyone\u2019s novels anyway. I thought, \u201cI\u2019m interested in these ideas but not in this way.\u201d It doesn\u2019t have to have a broad sweep. It doesn\u2019t have to have this narrative voice, you know, \u201cIt was 1912 in the Dust Bowl.\u201d That just felt fake to me.<\/p>\n

What felt real was finding this particular voice—which is not my voice. Jesse\u2019s a pretty desperate protagonist. It\u2019s first-person, she\u2019s not perfect. Even though the voice came to me easily, it took me awhile to throw it in a cage or a structure that it was appropriate for. In the end, what was interesting to me in that moment was the immediacy of wanting to have a child, not being able to get a child, and then the fall-out from that. It was more about wanting, just wanting, and less about the social history of adoption.<\/p>\n

So what was going on at the time that made you want to blow your head off?<\/b><\/p>\n

We had so many \u201csituations\u201d with birth mothers, going to meet them, flying places, having relationships with them, my spouse and I imagining having that child and then it not happening, or sometimes finding someone was just being cruel and wasn\u2019t even pregnant at all.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like: Okay, this Hispanic woman from Arizona has called the agency. She has four children, she can\u2019t parent this child, she\u2019s due in three months. So then my spouse and I think, \u201cOkay, in three months we\u2019re going to have this Hispanic child—my husband is a native Spanish speaker—great. Now we\u2019re going to find the adoption community that suits this child.\u201d<\/p>\n

You imagine that child\u2019s face. Then that child slips away.<\/p>\n

Then you\u2019re involved with an African-American woman from Washington. She\u2019s due in two minutes. Then that slips away.<\/p>\n

Remember Ally McBeal<\/em>? That dancing baby? One of the first holograms? Well, that baby was a white baby and our imagined baby could have been any race. But there\u2019s just this idea of this nameless, faceless glass baby.<\/p>\n

It does seem like a very novelistic way to live your own life, to imagine your way into so many different possible parenthoods. And then re-imagining the imagining. It\u2019s practically post-modern!<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve had this experience with something\u2014if not just by having a child and watching that child grow\u2014that when you are in something, you don\u2019t know the narrative arc, you don\u2019t know how the story will end, or if it\u2019s ever going to end. It\u2019s a lot to bear.<\/p>\n

I felt as if I was in a state of prolonged grief. I mean, it wasn\u2019t a war and nobody died. It wasn\u2019t sickness. But it did feel like the constant dashing of our hopes and dreams. Not every hope and not every dream, but it had taken over my life. But then I thought, \u201cOh, I\u2019ll write about it to make it interesting to myself. All these ideas about race and class and motherhood and what it means to be a parent and what it means to not be a parent and the culture of that in this country, I\u2019ll turn that into a novel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s be clear: this is not a memoir, and even though you and Jesse share similar experiences, her voice is not your own.<\/b><\/p>\n

I found this story I had written when I was sick in my twenties. It was so angry and immediate and entirely in the moment. I don\u2019t even remember writing it. And I dismissed it at the time, because it was so unprocessed in many ways. When I re-read it though, I thought, why did I dismiss this? It\u2019s such an unusual voice.\u00a0 And then I thought, \u201cIf I don\u2019t write about what is happening now, I\u2019m going to forget that part of this story.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not a memorial. The ideas were interesting to me. And also because I was like, I want to mark this, tattoo it, I need to remember what it was like.<\/p>\n

I think we were talking sometime last fall about your illness in your twenties and my pregnancy in my teens. You were saying that you had put off writing directly about that illness in your fiction. And I have told you that I used to write about anything but<\/i> being a teen mother, because I was afraid people would think it was the only story I could tell. <\/b><\/p>\n

Oh absolutely. At first I didn\u2019t want to write this story about wanting, and about domestic things, because I want to be taken seriously as a writer. These are important ideas that should not be dismissed, and yet, they are dismissed. At the time I was working on this novel that takes place in Greece. I\u2019m working on it again now. It\u2019s this big, sprawling Greek novel …<\/p>\n

We should also perhaps point out you have some personal experience with Greece, where your husband is from, though it would be unlikely anyone would confuse your sprawling social novel with autobiography…<\/b><\/p>\n

I do have personal experience with Greece, too, yes. But I thought, no, I\u2019m not going to push this adoption story aside. Not because of the commercial aspect. These stories are always less lucrative when you write them as novels as opposed to memoirs. But I had to make myself believe that these were significant ideas. And of course, the work is always better when you write what you fear.<\/p>\n

As writers we don\u2019t just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience. My last book was about the decline of radicalism in several families, and it involved the grain embargo, and punk rock, and as much stuff as I could throw in there—and isn\u2019t is so smart? I love that book and it is<\/i> smart, but not any smarter than this book. Why do we dismiss first-person, contemporary books about women\u2019s inner lives?<\/p>\n

This is the whole\u00a0 \u201cexperience\u201d vs. \u201cideas\u201d debate.<\/b><\/p>\n

Right. Lived experience vs. researched experience.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is a good time to point out that you were one of five women out of thirty-three fiction writers recently asked to give your opinion on Philip Roth\u2019s work in New York<\/em> magazine. You had a somewhat critical take.<\/b><\/p>\n

That was very strange to me and yet why should it be strange? Women are dismissed a lot. It\u2019s an old cry but it\u2019s a true one. And yes, Roth writes about himself, constantly. When a man writes about his inner life, and sticking his dick in a woman, it is important. It somehow gets to stand for everything. When a woman writes about her inner life, it stands only for her particular experience.<\/p>\n

I love that we are talking about this. It was a jump for me to feel that I should write about \u201cdomestic\u201d issues. There\u2019s something important about all of this and not just to women. I\u2019m not one of those writers to say, \u201cPlenty of men have read my book and loved it!\u201d But parenthood is important to men, too. They don\u2019t get enough credence for that.<\/p>\n

But going back to adoption: This is a place where the personal is extremely political. You\u2019ve got race, you\u2019ve got class, you\u2019ve got international politics and international law. You\u2019ve got the history of reproductive rights in this country. You\u2019ve got the issue of parents from first world countries taking third world children back to their countries to raise as their own, as opposed to say, offering global aid that would allow third world parents to raise their own children.<\/b><\/p>\n

Right. So after Roe vs. Wade<\/i>, the number of babies available for domestic plummeted. After the Korean war, international adoption became the big thing. But then Russia closed, as we all know. Guatemala closed because of the Hague laws and accusations of child trafficking. People are turning again to domestic adoption. What year did you almost place your daughter for adoption?<\/p>\n

1989.<\/b><\/p>\n

So adoption wasn\u2019t largely open. Now it\u2019s ninety-five percent open.<\/p>\n

Mine was open. But it was so uncommon then, I had to draw my own map. I have a purple Esprit shoebox in my office that used to be in my closet in my childhood bedroom. It has my adoption contract from 1989. It said things like I would receive cards and updates and photos annually. I don\u2019t think I was even going to be allowed to talk to her until she was eighteen.\u00a0Even that was so crazy that I\u00a0had to hire a private lawyer that my parents ended up paying for when I didn\u2019t go through with it.<\/b><\/p>\n

The adoptive parents would have paid for that now. You could have said no, and we still would have paid for it. You have no idea how much we spent. I\u2019m not an heiress. It just depletes everything.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s so odd, because birth mothers have historically been told that if they are \u201cgood\u201d mothers they will choose adoption to give their children the financial security they can not. But just as birth mothers are encouraged to judge their fitness as parents by their financial resources, adoptive parents are too. And it discriminates against them, too.<\/b><\/p>\n

It would be a lie to say that people are coming to adoption with joy at all times. Hope, perhaps, but it would be disingenuous to say that every part coming to an adoption isn\u2019t seriously grieving. Some people make the decision to adopt first and foremost and they don\u2019t even try to have their own children. But most people have been through a lot before they get to that point. They\u2019ve been sick or done several rounds of IVF. Likely, it\u2019s put a strain on their relationship, or if they are single, it\u2019s really made them think about how they are alone.<\/p>\n

The birth mother is placing the baby out of love. I still believe that. Well, the ones we\u2019ve dealt with who were actually pregnant, anyway. But it would be a lie to say you would be like, \u201cHey take her. I\u2019m on my way. Everything is fabulous.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is the lie that historically people tried to bury. The lie used to be that younger women or poorer women just didn\u2019t feel the same way about their babies. That motherhood was conditional. You could just be an incubator and that just knowing you weren\u2019t old enough or stable enough or \u201cgood\u201d would insulate you from all the feelings.<\/b><\/p>\n

With regard to socio-economics, domestically and internationally, I\u2019ve thought about this a lot: If they can\u2019t afford to parent, why don\u2019t we just give them the money to parent?\u00a0Jesse thinks a lot about how adoption is in fact very\u00a0selfish. And also altruistic. It\u2019s both of those things.<\/p>\n

When I take my baby around, people will say to me, \u201cOh, you\u2019ve dropped the weight so fast.\u201d Then when I say he\u2019s adopted, people fall all over themselves. \u201cOh my god, that\u2019s amazing.\u201d I get bigger scoops of ice cream, better seats, because people think it\u2019s so altruistic. But really, I would have thrown someone into traffic for this baby.<\/p>\n

At some point, you will do anything for a baby. At some point, I stopped thinking, \u201cThat person who has done seven IVFs is fucking nuts\u201d and went to, \u201cOh my God. I don\u2019t know what I wouldn\u2019t do.\u201d Yeah, I would go to Ethiopia if I was told there is no other way. And to clarify: My earlier reasons to not go to Ethiopia would not be that it was a black child. We were open to children of any race or ethnicity. But what is my connection to Ethiopia? I\u2019m happy to learn about it, but you have to give the child some of their cultural background.<\/p>\n

Right, and let\u2019s clarify that besides all the alleged ethical violations in some international adoptions, the issue of transcultural domestic adoption has been hotly debated since at least the seventies, when the National Association of Black Social Workers came out against interracial adoption, claiming that, among other things, adoptive parents from different cultural backgrounds are not as well-equipped to raise children as adoptive parents from the same background.<\/b><\/p>\n

Someone would have be in serious denial to think that two white parents could adopt a black baby and do nothing to address that difference. My friends who are white who have adopted black children will often be stopped on the street by people who will say, \u201cWhere did you get that kid?\u201d<\/p>\n

And they answer, what, \u201cThe shopping mall?\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

When they say, like, \u201cPennsylvania,\u201d people seem disappointed. They want them to say \u201cAfrica,\u201d as if Africa, the continent, is one place.<\/p>\n

It should be noted that with all of our talk about how we were open to all races and all cultures, we ended up with a white, half-Jewish baby. It should be said that I am Jewish.<\/p>\n

I wanted a baby of color, to be honest, because I wasn\u2019t attached to the idea that I look like the biological mother. I liked the idea of the adoption being clear; it was and is not something I am interested in hiding. I like my inside to match my outside. When Jesse imagines adopting an African-American child she thinks about how her husband will speak Spanish and Greek to him, and then she\u2019d take him to Hebrew school?\u00a0In a way, that child would have been a magnificent child of the world. But that child is also taking on a lot.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s interesting\u2014the idea of choosing whether you want your story to be visible or invisible. I\u2019ve been a mother for twenty-three years. And every single year, the fact that I am a young mother becomes more visible, not less. We look closer in age now that she\u2019s in her early twenties and I\u2019m in my late thirties than we ever did when I was in my twenties and she was a small child. Of course, we have had decades to get used to it. But it can be absolutely exhausting to have to haul out the story over and over again to complete strangers.<\/b><\/p>\n

You could be perceived as lesbians.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s in one of my stories! One of my bosses when I was in my twenties said that to me. \u201cHey, when you are thirty-four and she is eighteen, you will be hot<\/i>!\u201d And I thought, \u201cYou realize that is an incest fantasy?\u201d <\/b><\/p>\n

But it\u2019s interesting: the institution of adoption historically is extremely conservative\u2014the idea that a financially stable, two-parent family is so important that it trumps even biological ties. But contemporary\u00a0 adoption is also on the forefront of new ways families can be assembled—single parents, gay parents, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, even international families.<\/b><\/p>\n

I said earlier that in adoption, everyone is coming to it with grief. That\u2019s not always true. Young lesbians and gay men are not always coming to it with grief. Many are arriving only with hope. Many of them haven\u2019t been trying to get pregnant for years, they haven\u2019t had rounds of IVF, it hasn\u2019t ruined their sex lives, because the parameters are set.<\/p>\n

Back in the late nineties at Salon, we ran a story on a study that had come out at the time that claimed gay parents, as a group, scored even\u00a0better <\/i>than straight parents in general markers of good parenting and child welfare. Our writer\u2019s explanation was that gay parenthood is pretty deliberate.\u00a0 There are some gay families formed out of previous straight relationships, but most of the time, gay families are meticulously planned. As my friend Laurie Essig wrote in her story at the time, \u201cYou don\u2019t accidentally fall on the turkey baster and get pregnant.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

When you\u2019re sixteen\u2014or you are thirty-three and you have sex with your husband once and suddenly you are a mother\u2014you are just in it.\u00a0You might not have had the opportunity to ask all these questions I\u2019ve been asking myself for ten years. Like, \u201cWho am I as a person if I am not a mother?\u201d You don\u2019t really know until that baby shows up. But I\u2019ve had an extensive amount of time to investigate that idea. You hear parents complain about the dailiness of taking care of a child. But I don\u2019t mind that at all. He\u2019s been kind of airlifted into our lives at the most hectic time—I teach, I have this book coming out. But the rhythm of caretaking, taking care of an infant, I enjoy that partially, I\u2019m sure it\u2019s because I\u2019ve had so much time to think about it.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re talking about narrative in novels, but there is also a very distinct narrative in adoption, right? In the absence of a biological tie, adoptive parents are encouraged to create ownership by believing the baby they eventually receive is the only one for them—that it is fate, or destiny.<\/b><\/p>\n

That is some of the coded language that adoption has. It\u2019s fate. You have been on this path because you were waiting for this baby to come. I talk about that in the book. And maybe that\u2019s true. I can\u2019t say. But like so much of our thinking it is magical.<\/p>\n

Every adoption story is a ghost story.<\/p>\n

What is your daughter\u2019s name again?<\/p>\n

Sydney.<\/b><\/p>\n

If you placed her, she wouldn\u2019t have been named Sydney.<\/p>\n

No. She would have been named Chelsea. It\u2019s funny you bring that up, because I still know that. These are the kinds of things you come up against in open adoption. As you say, you imagine these other lives. It\u2019s true for both sides of an adoption. Names may be trivial, but it\u2019s little things like that disrupt the fantasy. Chelsea is a perfectly fine name, just not one I would choose. From the other side, you are, or at least I was, trying to imagine that the adoptive parents would be just like me, but you know, slightly older, slightly more stable. But then there are little things like that make you realize …<\/b><\/p>\n

… Those people aren\u2019t me.<\/p>\n

Exactly. It\u2019s the me\/not me thing. I think this is true, too, of all adoption stories. It\u2019s a kind of courtship. But instead of looking for someone to complement you, as you might in a marriage, you are looking for you, but slightly better. Your idealized version of yourself.<\/b><\/p>\n

That\u2019s interesting. Sometimes it\u2019s hard to be who you are\u2014and say you live in New York City, not in a sprawling ranch house in San Diego. My husband and I are in the arts. This is how it works out. Someone like you who wanted to move to New York City and become a writer would have found my spouse and me terribly attractive. Of course not everyone does. In the baby-making sections of the country, New York is not often seen as a good place to raise a child. I talk about this is in the book. One couple talks about how they chose the adoptive parents and one of them says, \u201cAs long as they\u2019re not in New York. Everyone gets shot there.\u201d<\/p>\n

I like that phrase. The \u201cbaby-making parts of the country.\u201d\u00a0But that\u2019s the mismatch, right? The parts of the country where the largest percentage of women choose adoption rather than abortion are often not the same parts of the country with the largest percentage of potential adoptive parents—gay couples, single women, those infamous career couples who have delayed childbearing. When I was pregnant in Idaho, I would have died to have found a writer and a bilingual artist living in New York. I would have loved to find a gay couple. But all the adoptive couples in the folders were rich religious conservatives with ranch houses. Or people who pretended to be rich religious conservatives with ranch houses, because that\u2019s what they were told birth mothers were looking for.<\/b><\/p>\n

I never found a you. And you never found a me. But we weren\u2019t ourselves yet when you were sixteen.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re also a bit close in age. Sixteen-year-old me could have called up nineteen-year-old you and said, \u201cHey Jennifer. You want a baby?\u201d But you probably wouldn\u2019t have gone for it.<\/b><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s go back to how you made your decision. When you made the switch, it\u2019s not because they named her Chelsea. It sounds like your decision came from within.<\/p>\n

I do remember being bothered by being told that they were so glad they knew I was pretty and smart and from a good family. I\u2019m sure they meant it as a compliment, but at the end, it made me wonder: What if I weren\u2019t<\/i> those things? Would they still want my child?\u00a0What if my child turned out to not be those things? At the time, it made me furious and made them seem intolerant. But now, twenty-three years later, when I hear some of the things you went through, I feel much less inclined to judge anyone for that.<\/b><\/p>\n

I had to go give this talk in Palm Beach soon after my son arrived. Afterwards, this woman came up to me and said, \u201cI know people who have adopted. Boy, are you in for it.\u201d A week later, another woman came up to me and said the same thing.<\/p>\n

So the idea is that adopted children somehow come with more genetic risks than biological children? <\/b><\/p>\n

They said that the people they know have mentally ill children, or children with genetic diseases. But this is something I touch on in the book: I can\u2019t speak for you, but if you lay out the medical history of my family, you will see some serious problems. Everyone\u2019s family tree has some terribly broken branches.<\/p>\n

Oh, absolutely. Every family has bad genes lurking around. Parenthood is always<\/i> a gamble. I guess that\u2019s why we are both turned off by the idea that you can somehow protect yourself. My decision, in the end, wasn\u2019t so much about rejecting the adoptive parents as rejecting the idea that choosing to keep my daughter was choosing to give up everything else—college, leaving home, becoming an adult. When I remember to think about it, I\u2019m still sort of shocked that I ended up going to college and becoming a writer living in New York, just like the imagined parent I never saw in the brochure. But last time I was in my hometown, I drove past a house being sold by the man who would have been her father. He was a realtor. Later, I saw his photograph in his company\u2019s ad in the paper. It was so odd.<\/b><\/p>\n

The ghost story for you is: Let\u2019s say Sydney became Chelsea. Whatever you relationship you had with them may have stayed or may have fallen away. But you would have been haunted by that. As I imagine are haunted by the Chelsea they never had.<\/p>\n

As you know, we got a baby a few weeks ago. But there is also all the ghost stories of the babies we didn\u2019t get. Their due dates passed and they did not arrive. Or the baby we had and we had to give back. He\u2019s a ghost.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s funny.\u00a0I did an interview the other day, and the interviewer began a question by saying, \u201cYou write that motherhood is like memory …\u201d And I said, \u201cI don\u2019t remember that, what was the next sentence?\u201d It was as I was saying earlier: I have already forgotten the writing of it. It was like a possession.<\/p>\n

I know the line she\u2019s talking about. It\u2019s true. As a parent, you do get your childhood back, but in weird fragments you wouldn\u2019t expect.<\/b><\/p>\n

It is. When you put on the Desitin, you are like, \u201cOh my God, I remember that smell.\u201d You are not in control of how you are triggered, which is always true with memory. But you lose that, right? I have a ten-week-old. I know I will forget what it is like now. But you also want to fix the past. Take what you want from the past, leave what you don\u2019t. And yet, here I am with the Desitin, doing the same things my parents did.<\/p>\n

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I first knew of Jennifer Gilmore as the author of two ambitious, warm, hilarious novels (Golden Country, 2006, and Something Red, 2010) that, placed side by side, provide an admirably thorough and thoroughly amusing take on the some of the most interesting ideas, inventions, characters, and past-times of the twentieth century\u2014television, immigration, two-in-one cleaning products, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":522,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[10743,10742,8963,6412,10744,75],"class_list":["post-51367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-adoption","tag-jennifer-gilmore","tag-parenting","tag-punk","tag-the-cold-war","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cEvery Adoption is a Ghost Story\u201d: An Interview with Jennifer Gilmore by Amy Benfer<\/title>\n<meta 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