Introducing “Belonging Matters: Conversations on Adoption, Family, and Kinship” by Julie Ryan McGue
“Belonging Matters” is a book that addresses adoption and its impact on identity, family, and kinship. It encourages readers to contemplate the significance of belonging in shaping personal experiences and relationships. The book supports the adoption community while engaging those outside it in meaningful conversations about acceptance and inclusion. Ultimately, it highlights the importance of belonging in enriching our lives and driving us toward fulfillment.
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- Can you provide an overview of “Belonging Matters: Conversations on Adoption, Family, and Kinship” and what motivated you to write this book?
I wrote Belonging Matters to serve as a companion piece to my first memoir, Twice a Daughter. In Belonging Matters, I delve into topics I only mention in that memoir, such as the difficult conversations I had with both my birth and adoptive mothers, my relationships with my birth father and my mother-in-law, and the subsequent difficult contact I have had with my birth mother.
Belonging Matters is meant to support the adoption community and to create a conversation with those not touched by adoption. The collection explores the pursuit of identity and the boundaries of family and kinship, and it challenges us to discern with whom and where we belong. It is my experience that often our sense of belonging is strongest with those outside immediate family, thus the term kinship.
- What are the central ideas and stories explored in the book?
The search for identity and belonging is fundamental to the human experience. How we come to a sense of our self and where we find belonging are different for each person. For adoptees from the closed adoption era, these are challenging constructs to get our heads around and to attain to reach wholeness. Many of us find belonging with the folks we are related to biologically, but often the people we connect to on a deep level are not birth relatives. They might be friends, colleagues, the seatmate on an airplane. In Belonging Matters, I explore the concepts of kinship and family and share personal anecdotes to add color to those concepts.
- How did you approach the structuring of “Belonging Matters” to effectively convey its themes and messages?
The book is divided into three sections: Adoption, Family, and Kinship. The essays within each section fall under those themes. Each is meant to stand alone, so the reader can turn to any page and peruse a topic of interest. As a result, some information is repeated. Belonging Matters is meant to serve as a companion piece to my first memoir, Twice a Daughter. In Belonging Matters, I delve into topics I only mention in Twice––such as the difficult conversations I had with both my birth and adoptive mothers, my relationships with my birth father and my mother-in-law, and the subsequent contact I have had with my birth mother.
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