About the Author

Janine Veto has worked as an arts administrator and development director in Chicago, New York and Madison, Wisconsin. Her Chicago career encompassed public television and the Chicago Council on Fine Arts where she created their first literature program. During 25 years in New York she served as Development Director Poets & Writers, Inc., Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Joffrey Ballet and as consultant to Lincoln Center Inc., the School of American Ballet, National Public Radio an many others. Her novel Iris was published by Alyson Publications.

Reviews

Even as an adopted child, Janine Veto knew there were big pieces missing from her jigsaw life. In setting out to find her birth mother, she inadvertently stumbled on a lost tribe. She is fierce in pursuit, undaunted in courage, and absolute in love. In this gripping memoir, she delivers a meditation on what it means to claim your place in the human family, and what it costs to be made whole. - Jean Feraca, author of I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio jeanferaca@wordpress.com. Whether intended or not, Janine Veto's compelling memoir is a vivid study of the nature/nurture argument, demonstrating the impact of both. Despite her middle-class upbringing, Veto drifts into behaviors that are clearly mirrored in the natural mother and father she finds. As an added fill-up, her multi-layered story is also that of an adoptee who, as a gay single woman, adopts a girl from China. - Lorraine Dusky, author of hole in my heartJanine Veto writes about adoption from the inside out. Herself an adoptee, she is also the mother of an adopted Chinese daughter. Born of a single woman in a time when pregnant single women had to hide, Veto recounts her struggles to find her birth mother and thus reclaim a lost shard of her identity. A memoir that is at once moving, compelling, and a page-turner. - Emily Prager, author of Wuhu Diaries