First Family Bashing: A sport for some adoptees

First Family Basher Lisa Lutz

Our mothers always said “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” It seems too often, though, that adoptees either didn't hear this or somehow internalized that the rule didn't apply to their first mothers, those selfless individuals who loved them so much that they – well you know.

Lisa Lutz joins a gaggle of literary adoptees, which includes B. J. Lifton, A. M. Homes, and Amy Dean, who find what they see as seriously deficient birth parents and feel free to tell the world of their sorry genetic origins.

Lutz, the author of a series of detective novels featuring a sleuthing family, writes about her reunion with her birth parents in the “Lives” section of the May 6 issue of The New York Times Magazine, “Where Did I Come From?" The online version adds the title "I Found My Biological [not natural, real, birth, first, but the icy biological] Parents and Wish I Hadn't."