Truth and Agency: Writing Ideas For People Who Were Adopted

By Anne Heffron

In order to feel fully rooted, it's important to know your story. If your personal narrative starts "The day we got you," then you are already in the gaslit land of the uprooted. It can be a struggle to feel fully human when you don't know the details of who you are and where you came from. It is still possible to tell your story when you don't know, for example, who your biological parents are. It is still possible to tell your story when the people who adopted you ask you not to delve into your own past. It is still possible to tell your story when you are afraid of how writing it might make you feel. You just need a guide. Anne Heffron had to unlearn many of the lessons she learned while getting an M.F.A. in graduate school and teach herself how to write a story that exists beneath the surface, pre-language, in order to write her memoir You Don't Look Adopted . It took over thirty years to see why traditional story-telling classes were not helping her write her own story, but she finally developed a series of questions she called Write or Die that helps people see who they are, what their voice is, what their story is, who their audience is, and how to change any writing blocks into flaming doorways of opportunity. Those questions, along with the lessons she has been teaching to hundreds of adopted people, make up the heart of Truth and Agency . This is a book to help you powerfully tap into your voice and to find agency in the truth of you.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0B34ZRSH1
• ISBN13: 9798835081752
• Release Date: June 2022
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 201 Pages
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.0"