Adoption tale told from a man’s view doesn’t need subterfuge

THE lesson aspiring writers learned from the scandal over James Frey’s memoir “A Million Little Pieces” is that it’s best to be straight with your reader. Don’t claim you spent three months in jail when it was less than a day. If there’s a lesson to be learned from “If You Could See Me Now” by Michael Mewshaw it would be: Don’t play coy.

Mewshaw, author of 10 novels and five nonfiction books, sets out to give readers the male point of view on unwanted pregnancy and adoption with a story from his past: the 1964 birth of a baby girl and her subsequent adoption. Judging from the way he backs into the tale and the specifics he fails to relate early on about his role, it seems that he’s purposefully trying to mislead readers, a stance that ultimately undermines trust in him as a narrator.

The book opens with the adopted child, Amy, now a woman planning a family of her own, who locates Mewshaw in London in order to track down her medical history -- not, she says adamantly, to find a new set of parents. As he considers how to deal with Amy (she could be trying to bilk him somehow), he worries about what to tell his nearly grown sons. What will they think if they know this aspect of his past?

In his first conversation with Amy, Mewshaw grills her on what she knows about her parentage and how she knows it. Before answering questions about her mother’s identity and confirming he is the father listed on her birth certificate, he insists that Amy send the information given by the Children’s Home Society in Los Angeles, which had arranged the adoption.

“Why won’t you tell me who you are?” Amy asks in that first phone conversation, a question on this reader’s mind as well.

After that exchange, Mewshaw enters into soulful conversations with his sons and with his wife, Linda, who, he tells us, “greeted the news not just with equanimity but with something akin to joy. She had always wanted a daughter and viewed Amy as a surrogate.” Receiving Amy’s documents from Los Angeles, he sees they’re legit. He next calls her adoptive mother to discuss Amy with her, then does research on how adoptions are facilitated, considers getting in touch with Amy’s biological mother and finally tells Amy the truth he’s known all along: He isn’t -- and could never have been -- Amy’s father.

It seems that the woman he was dating at the time (he gives her the pseudonym Adrienne and tells us she’s now a top member of the Republican Party, a big-name executive who’s frequently seen on CNN) became pregnant by another man before she and Mewshaw had entered into a sexual relationship. Though Mewshaw stayed with her throughout the pregnancy and helped arrange the adoption, he’s not biologically related to Amy.

Mewshaw’s disingenuousness with Amy is frustrating and makes one wonder what the author thought he’d gain by withholding these facts. Perhaps he was trying to heighten narrative tension, to get us more interested in the tale -- a reasonable assumption given that, without creating the false impression that he is Amy’s father, there might not be much of a story to draw us in. What follows is not what readers might expect -- a narrative focused on Amy and how adoption, even from the sidelines, shaped Mewshaw. Rather, it’s primarily a reiteration of the torrid affair he had with Adrienne and how he’d desperately wanted to marry her and was even willing to raise the baby as his own, but she wouldn’t have him.

Later, Mewshaw gives Amy her biological mother’s phone number, trying to facilitate a phone reunion, but Adrienne is not interested; she just wants to get on with her life and is furious that Mewshaw dragged her into this triangle. He also helps her contact her birth father, but Amy feels no connection with him. In the end, readers feel only for poor Amy, who was simply trying to get her medical history.

For a book that’s supposed to shed light on adoption from the male point of view, a subject that could have been fascinating, it’s too bad that Mewshaw chose to begin this one in shadow and misdirection.

Bernadette Murphy is co-author of “The Tao Gal’s Guide to Real Estate.”