Marilyn & Me A Memoir of Adoption

Marilyn and Me is the story of an adoptee who finds the courage to confront the demons of rejection and abandonment that were internalised and which have dogged her life as a result of the trauma of being separated from her birth mother. Coral relates of not having a clear sense of identity or sense of belonging. She conveys how material provision and comfort are not necessarily enough to mould an adopted child into a healthy and whole person emotionally. The first two chapters are written with pathos in the third person and are fictional but based on letters that were in her birth records. The first describes her birthmother going to the agency and handing her daughter over and the second her adoptive parents’ journey to the agency and their excitement at the prospect of receiving a new baby. The third chapter onwards are written in the first person.Coral was born in Croydon and adopted at the age of three months, in 1954. She was named Marilyn by her birthmother and her adoptive parents renamed her Coral. She was told at the age of seven and remembers taking on a sense of shame and of being different. She explains how she took on a ‘false self’ as a coping mechanism to fit in to her adoptive family. The theme of loneliness and disconnectedness comes across clearly throughout the book, but culminates in some sense of belonging resulting from the search for her real family. The author is honest in sharing her emotional journey through loss, disappointment and her search for identity, to finding her authentic self. She talks about her life in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, and afterwards she became a cook and house-keeper in the USA. When she began her research in 1982, at the age of 28, after returning from a two year contract working for the British Consul General in Cleveland Ohio, Coral discovered the truth about her beginnings. In 2004 she obtained her birth records which include original copies of letters written by her birthmother to the Adoption Agency. She also worked for a Member of Parliament at a constituency in South Wales, who became the Secretary of State for Wales, and one of notoriety. She talks of her Welsh identity and how the mixed identities that make up who she is have involved an experience of displacement making her feel she belongs to neither world. She is marked as different in Wales because she is a Welsh speaking English person displaced and brought here. She relates how the research and reunion has been in stages because it is all consuming and a hugely emotional journey. She did meet her real father and siblings soon after her initial findings and they have welcomed her into the family. Although she never got to meet her real mother, the person she really yearned to re-connect with, the initial meeting with her father and siblings gave her some sense of belonging that she had never known before. She has similar characteristics and traits, the same features and mannerisms and build, even the same interests to members of her real family, and so her story is interesting in terms of the nature versus nurture debate. She concludes that she is a mixture of genetic make-up and upbringing.It’s a brutally honest memoir that taps into the core of every adopted person’s soul and spirit. One can feel the pain and sense of abandonment in the words. Marilyn & Me will speak to other adoptees, and will change your understanding of adoption. Will she find happiness and her identity or is heartache going to subsume her?