Shapiro’s mother told her that when she was at her most fertile, her father rushed to Philadelphia from his job in New York to provide his sperm for the insemination. Her doctor there, Edmond Farris, had developed a new method for determining ovulation. Her mother was artificially inseminated at a clinic in Philadelphia. Shapiro had always known that her parents had fertility problems. The implications are not only dramatic, they completely rewrite Shapiro’s origin story. In “Inheritance,” she expertly mines for narrative gold after she takes a commercial DNA test and quickly finds out she is not biologically related to her half-sister from her father’s first marriage. Her newest book, “ Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love,” is her fifth memoir and brings together themes of family and secrets-subjects that have preoccupied Shapiro as a writer.
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