NONFICTION - May 2, 1993

STORIES OF ADOPTION: Loss and Reunion by Eric Blau, foreword by Annette Baran (NewSage Press: $16.95; 131 pp.) Those unfamiliar with adoption tend to see it as an antiseptic, bureaucratic process that ends soon after a newborn is passed from one set of arms to another. But as these informal, yet compelling portraits of 38 Southern Californians attest, adoption is more often a lingering process, intensely painful and emotionally messy for everyone involved. Eric Blau, an associate professor of medicine at UC San Diego, is “outside the adoption triangle” and admits to accepting the “commonly held beliefs” that the system works smoothly for everyone involved. But the birth parents, adoptive parents and adoptees he interviews and so artfully photographs here speak of their anger, loss and remorse decades after adoption.

One woman, for example, only discovered at age 23, when a family friend made a careless comment, that she had been adopted at birth. The knowledge was “like . . . the earth cracking. My sense of foundation was ruptured. It was a devastating experience to be told that all the things that I had formed my identity around were not true.” Just as poignant are the three birth fathers Blau profiles. Each thought he would forget the child he inadvertently fathered. None could. “I’ve felt incomplete, and I had never gone on to complete anything until I found my daughter,” says one man. “When I found her, I realized that my life had come full circle.”