June 6, 2015

Creation Stories: A Review of Lori Jakiela’s, Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe by R. A. Voss

cover credit: Atticus Books
Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe by Lori Jakiela
Atticus Books (2015)

Reviewed by R. A. Voss

Belief. Beliefs are opinions unsupportable by proof. Truth. Truths are facts supported by proof. Indeed, a recent New York Times article decries this curriculum commonly taught to our nation’s youth because those simple definitions belie the reality that sometimes things are both. It’s those places—where belief and truth intersect—that Lori Jakiela probes in her latest memoir, Belief Is Its Own Kind Of Truth, Maybe.

Loss. For adoptees like this author, life begins with loss. Loss of a birth family and the genetic guidance that cues infants in regarding their place in the world, sets them on a quest for the truth surrounding their identity and how they came to be. Although all writers begin a story with an empty page, the task is even more daunting for people like Jakiela, as she notes:
“All first pages are blank, of course, but for adopted people more so.”
So as not to seem ungrateful to her adoptive parents, for most of her life, Jakiela sublimated her sense of something missing. This happened until, in middle-age, another seminal loss—her adoptive mother, who raised her and taught her how to love and nurture her own children—propels it back into her awareness. She acknowledges this in the book’s opening revelation:
“When my real mother dies, I go looking for another one.”
The author’s use of the phrase “real mother” to describe her adoptive mother clues readers that her search generates no Dr. Phil reunion. Her description of the Catholic Charities counselor and office sets the tone for her bare-roots tale:
“The Catholic Charities counselor’s word for this other mother I want after decades to find is biological. Illegitimate is another word for people who end up like me. It’s what I feel now, unlawful, unauthorized, unwarranted here in this office that smells like antiseptic and rubber gloves, hot teeth drilled down to the bone.”
Jakiela’s attempts at prying truth from an organization founded on secrecy and sealed records proves largely unyielding. Forced to settle for “non-identifying information,” she’s denied access even to the medical history she alleges is all she seeks. Yet, readers see through this self-deception to realize she wants more—she wants what all children ask of their moms: Please see me, acknowledge me, accept me, love me.

Throughout her life, the author has imagined and been told personal creation stories by her adoptive family, but the versions are incomplete—partial fabrications that leave her unprepared for encounters that come later. In the absence of facts, memoir crosses into fiction that attempts to restore “…certain lost and key moments that affected [her] life, but for which [she] was not present.” Those parts conjure a birth mother who is a more sympathetic character. But though they provide juxtaposition, Jakiela is at her most powerful in memoir mode when she narrates her experiences and thoughts with scalpel-precision that debrides primal wounds.

Jakiela examines her birth and upbringing through her consciousness of her own strong motherly love and marital ties. She sorts through myriad ambiguities in messages heard from her “real” parents, shifting notions about what is true and what is false, acknowledges what is real in all of it, and squares it with her beliefs. She recognizes one reason that some beliefs become necessary truths for people compelled by their situations to invent their own creation stories. She explains:
“There are so many versions of the truth. All of them would hurt someone, I think.”
But needing to believe in goodness in the face of facts that reveal otherwise, she writes:
“I need to believe in my mother’s buried softness the way I need to know I and my children haven’t inherited a terrible disease. If paranoia and cruelty run like cancer in my birth mother’s bloodline, I’m hoping something else will show up to provide balance.”
This is a book about the lies we are told, the lies we tell ourselves, and the things we just believe without proof. It searches out the authenticity in all of it and illuminates how beliefs sometimes persist because we need both the truth and the lies to make life livable—to keep loving ourselves and each other. Further, it’s about leaving behind the life one inherits in favor of the life one chooses in response to everything sensed since leaving the womb, and having it be better than enough. The story is at times doleful, but the author is always self-sentient and honest.

“I never had a voice in any of this,” Jakiela writes of her conception and adoption, but in this book her voice is strong and her emotion finds expression. Forty-five episodic chapters of varying lengths form a staccato rhythm that echoes Jakiela’s disjointedness as she grieves and strives for wholeness. Yet, by the close, the book becomes legato as all the parts smoothly bond like the city of Pittsburgh, where the author was raised near, “All those rivers and bridges, connecting everything to everything.” Similarly, Jakiela recognizes that the life she has created for herself, deeply connected to her husband and children, is the one that matters, while readers recognize those places in themselves where belief and truth mingle.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.