I was researching real-life accounts of people’s interactions with social workers for a previous novel when I noticed how many were about adopted teenagers who’d tracked down their birth families online. Sometimes the stories had happy outcomes – the teenagers were able to get some answers about who they were and where they’d come from. But there were enough that were messy, or simply fraught with peril, to make me jot down in my ideas book: Adoption reunion - goes wrong?
Coming back to that note months later, I dug into the topic some more, and discovered something that to me seemed extraordinary. Here in the UK, adoptees’ birth certificates are sealed until they turn eighteen, and contact after that is meant to be possible only if both parties separately sign up for a government register. But the reality, according to the Adoption Society, is that over a quarter of adoptees now contact their birth families before then. The reason they can do this is the unintended consequence of a well-meant policy: since 2005, it has been a statutory requirement for social workers to leave a ‘Later Life letter’ with the adoptive parents, explaining exactly who the child’s birth parents were, and the circumstances surrounding their adoption.
The Later Life letter is written for the adopted child to read when they’re old enough to understand it. The exact timing is left up to the adoptive parents, but according to the guidance they’re given, that’s usually when the child is about twelve. (The notion that under-sixteens or under-eighteens are ‘minors’ has now largely been replaced in our legal system by the idea that capacity and responsibility is a sliding scale, the so-called ‘Gillick competency’ rule; ironically, named after a campaigner who thought the very opposite – Victoria Gillick was trying to prevent under-sixteens from being given contraception without their parents’ consent.)
The Later Life letter therefore gets read at a time in life when any young person is beginning to wrestle with their identity, and to pull away from their family unit as they become more independent. For children who were adopted, that natural process can be exacerbated. Therapists use the term ‘ghost kingdoms’ to describe the way some create seductive fantasies of what their ‘real’ parents might be like. Add to that the fact that some will also have attachment issues stemming from early neglect, or simply from the process of being taken into care, and you can see why the urge to break away can be a powerful one.
It works the other way round, too. For mothers whose babies were adopted, it can leave a hole in their life which never entirely shrinks. It’s a claim much repeated (though also much contested) that the UK carries out more ‘forced’ adoptions – that is, adoptions by court order against the parent’s wishes – than any other European country. Many of those mothers may also be searching for traces of their birth children.
As I began fleshing out my research and giving it the shape of a thriller, I was acutely aware that I was dealing with issues that, for many people, are all too real. My Darling Daughter is about a rebellious fifteen-year-old who finds her birth mother online, and discovers that she appears to have the perfect life – married to a rock musician, wealthy, with a gorgeous Instagram-worthy house and no other children. But it turns out there are details in the Later Life letter that don’t quite tally with the glamorous image the mother’s been presenting, and there are hidden dangers for both characters as their very different worlds collide.
Adoption in fiction is of course nothing new – it was a staple of Victorian ‘sensation’ writers like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, who used it to explore issues relevant to the age, such as status and social mobility. But in the era of Facebook and Instagram, adoption also throws up new questions of the kind central to any domestic noir – questions of identity, loyalty and trust, not to mention how well we really know our nearest and dearest, with nothing less than your whole family unit at stake. It’s a sensitive subject – one I’ve tried to approach tactfully – but it’s also a fascinating one, and a cracking starting point for a psychological drama. My characters certainly aren’t typical – most adoptions are successful, as are most adoption reunions – but they are meant to be authentic, and I hope my readers will enjoy the twisty and sometimes mind-bending journey they’re about to embark on together.
My Darling Daughter by J P Delaney (Quercus) Out Now
The child you never knew knows all your secrets... Out of the blue, Susie Jukes is contacted on social media by Anna, the girl she gave up for adoption fifteen years ago. But when they meet, Anna's home life sounds distinctly strange to Susie and her husband Gabe. And when Anna's adoptive parents seem to overreact to the fact she contacted them at all, Susie becomes convinced that Anna needs her help. But is Anna's own behaviour simply what you'd expect from someone recovering from a traumatic childhood? Or are there other secrets at play here - secrets Susie has also been hiding for the last fifteen years?
More information about J P Delaney can be found on his website.
No comments:
Post a Comment