Fictional 'Mothers' Reveal Facts Of A Painful Adoption Process
After years of trying to conceive, novelist Jennifer Gilmore and her husband decided to pursue a domestic open adoption. They were told they'd be matched within a year; it took four. And along the way they faced complicated decisions and heartbreak.
Gilmore, who has channeled those decisions and heartbreaks into personal essays and articles for outlets such as The New York Times and The Atlantic, has now turned to fiction, her native genre, to explore the experience. Her latest novel, The Mothers, chronicles the struggles of Jesse and Ramon, a fictional couple trying to adopt who face many of the same challenges Gilmore and her husband faced in real life.
"While my husband and I were going through all this, issues started coming up, ideas about race and class and what motherhood was for us and what it was in America," Gilmore tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "and I thought, 'This would be great for a novel.' I'm sure that I could've written a memoir about it. I've read many elegant and beautiful memoirs that have affected me greatly, but I really think like a novelist, and I wanted to be harder on my character than I probably could be on myself."
The heartbreaks and difficult decisions she and the novel's protagonists share involve babies born too early and with developmental disorders, and women claiming to be pregnant seeking adoptive parents, but who are really just out to extort money from vulnerable couples.
“ There are laws for the birth mothers, as there should be. There are laws for the child, as there should be. But there are no laws to protect these prospective adoptive parents.