Many adoptees - myself included - delay the search for our birth mothers for fear of rejection. We don't believe we could handle it. We are still feeling the aftershocks of the initial rejection. Lori shares what she's learned about surviving rejection, underestimating our emotional resilience and ability to bounce back. We both loved this deep and profound conversation and hope you do too.

Here's a bit about Lori and her book:

Jakiela is a Professor of English/Creative Writing at The University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where she directs the Creative & Professional Writing Program. She writes a monthly column, "Stories of Our Neighbors"–modeled on the work of the great oral historian Studs Terkel–for Pittsburgh Magazine, and is the recipient of multiple Golden Quill Awards from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania. 

She has taught in the graduate MFA program at Chatham University, in the undergraduate writing program at The State University of New York at Purchase, classes and workshops for Creative Nonfiction Foundation, and is currently on the adjunct faculty of the Doctor of Ministry program in Creative Writing at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.  

A former international flight attendant, she lives in her hometown, Trafford, PA, with her husband, the author Dave Newman, and their children.  

After her adoptive mother’s death, Lori Jakiela, at the age of forty, begins to seek the identity of her birth parents. In the midst of this loss, Jakiela also finds herself with a need to uncover her family’s medical history to gather answers for her daughter’s newly revealed medical ailments. This memoir brings together these parallel searches while chronicling intergenerational questions of family. Through her work, Jakiela examines both the lives we are born with and the lives we create for ourselves. Desires for emotional resolution comingle with concerns of medical inheritance and loss in this honest, humorous, and heartbreaking memoir.

https://www.amazon.com/Belief-Its-Kind-Truth-Maybe/dp/1938769422

https://twitter.com/lorijakiela

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lori-jakiela-2555716

https://www.lorijakiela.net/

Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.