“I hated the idea of adoption when I was young. It had, I knew, hurt my mother (adopted when she was sixteen months old), and when I was eleven my mother had left us, recoiling slowly but inevitably into the wombed comfort of her orphanhood. She couldn’t make her own motherhood last. Worst of all, I had contracted the tendency myself, and at seventeen had given away a baby of my own.” Jan Waldron, author