Why read American Bastard?

Book cover of American Bastard

Book description

American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America. This memoir travels across literal continents-and continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who's won three Stanley Cups-and her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. This is not the whitewashed…

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Why read it?

1 author picked American Bastard as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Karen Elizabeth Lee

Author

This recommendation returns to one of my most passionate interests—that of adopted children and the families they are placed in. Beatty is a poet and this is reflected in her memoir—it is not the usual chronological narrative as most memoirs are. She breaks the myth of the “special” or “chosen baby” to tell her truth of the lives of adopted children. Beatty exposes, through vignettes and her poetry, her meetings with her birth mother, her adopted family, her attempts to know who she is and where she came from. She breaks open the belief that you…

From Karen's list on The best memoir books to show human life in its reality—the good, the bad and the survivable.