The DNA results and some internet sleuthing allowed Shapiro and her husband to track down the identity of her father, a now-retired physician who specialized in, of all things, medical ethics. Her parents had traveled to Philadelphia for artificial insemination an anonymous sperm donor was Shapiro’s biological father. With astonishing speed, Shapiro and her husband unraveled the mystery. An offhand remark made decades earlier by Shapiro’s now-deceased mother provided a clue to the puzzle: She told Shapiro that she had been conceived in Philadelphia. Furthermore, she wasn’t biologically related to her half-sister, her father’s child from a previous marriage. She gamely agreed, and gave it little thought until several months later, when the kit’s shocking results showed that she was only half Jewish. Years later, when Shapiro’s husband decided to order a DNA kit, he asked her if she wanted one as well. When Shapiro was 23, her father died from injuries he suffered in a devastating car crash, a tragedy she chronicled in her 1998 memoir, Slow Motion. “All my life I had known there was a secret. You could have gotten us bread from the Nazis.” The dramatic proclamation made a searing imprint on Shapiro. In fact, a family friend and Holocaust survivor was so startled by her unlikely features that she peered into her eyes and announced, “We could have used you in the ghetto, little blondie. Growing up as an only child in 1960s and ’70s New Jersey, Shapiro couldn’t help feeling partially like an outsider as the pale, blue-eyed, blond-haired daughter of her darker, Jewish parents. “I needed every single brain cell to focus on this discovery and to try to understand what it meant,” she says, speaking from her home in the Connecticut countryside. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that she unwittingly uncovered the biggest secret of all: Her beloved, late father wasn’t her biological father.

Dani Shapiro has been thinking about secrets all of her life, exploring the theme repeatedly in five novels and four memoirs.

Inheritance dani shapiro