About this item
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.
About the Author
Lori Jakiela is the author of four memoirs, including The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious (C&R Press/WPA Press) ; Miss New York Has Everything (Hatchette) ; Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker (Bottom Dog Press) ; and Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe (Atticus Books) , which won the William Saroyan International Writing Award from Stanford University, was a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award and the Housatonic Book Prize, and was named one of 20 Nonfiction Books Not to Miss in 2015 by The Huffington Post. She is also the author of the poetry collection Spot the Terrorist. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Rumpus, Brevity, LitHub, Electric Literature and more. She teaches in the undergraduate creative and professional writing program at The University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. She is also co-director of Chautauqua Institution's Summer Writers Festival, the Poetry Curator for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's "Saturday Poem" feature, and teaches community writing workshops in her hometown of Trafford, PA. For more, visit Jakiela's website at http://lorijakiela.net.
