Julie Ryan McGue is an American writer, an adopted person, and an identical twin. In her books, essays, and other writing, she talks candidly about family and identity through the lens of adoption She is the author of two published works: Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging and Belonging Matters: Conversations on Adoption, Family, and Kinship. Her third book, Twice the Family: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Sisterhood was released today, and we had the opportunity to sit down with her to talk about her latest book, a coming-of-age memoir set in Chicago’s western suburbs in the 1960s, that dives into the complexity of family and adoption with an unflinching point of view.
There is a quote in your book about your parents that we suspect will resonate with a lot of adopted people: “They professed to love us all equally. But for me, it wasn't so simple. I would spend a lifetime wondering about what happened to my family of origin, and why closed adoption took me away from them, I would also harbor an inner fear that if I wasn't good enough, if I didn't obey every rule and fulfill every expectation, then my adoptive parents might consider giving me away like my first family had done.” Can you expand on that for us?
I think because we did not have any context about why we were placed for adoption, it created a lot of anxiety and fear. And while our parents profess to love us, not knowing why we landed there was anxiety provoking. And I think that when you are the oldest in a family anyway, you have this people pleasing need; this need to be a perfect thing. But my mom, as you know, from reading the book, had a temper, and that certainly played into it. I talk about it a lot in the book. I didn't want to be the brunt of that anger, and it did demoralize me. I have a friend that says I'm a recovering perfectionist, and I think maybe all of us are, I guess, if we're the oldest or if we're adopted, because I know other adoptees talk about being these people-pleasers and fear of rejection. I think maybe open adoption addresses this better than the closed adoption – that lack of information created the fear. Certainly my sister was the same way with striving to be always better.
It’s tough to imagine, that idea of a child carrying the belief that they have to work to be good enough to deserve having a family, or internalizing the idea that they have to earn the right to stay in their family, instead of just operating on the assumption that they automatically deserve and belong in their family.
We had some family friends – this is just occurring to me, and maybe that this is where some of that comes from – they had all boys in their family, and the mom, who was a good friend of my mom, really wanted daughters, and for a while, my sister and I sort of filled that niche for them. Then they took in a foster child, a little girl, and she was a bedwetter. And no matter what they did to deal with that, she was still a bedwetter and also had some other issues, and they gave her back. And I remember thinking, oh, that could have happened to us, you know, if we weren't good enough, if we were the bedwetters or something, we could have gone back, maybe not back to our birth moms, but back to the orphanage St Vincent's in Chicago, and I think for foster kids, that fear is something that they recognize even more. They live it.
Oh, that's just heartbreaking. In your book, you make it very clear that your parents do want you, that they don't push on that fear of not being good enough to be kept. It's clear that they are very committed to this family they created, but you still had that feeling of having to earn a place in your family, having to be really good. That’s a lot of pressure on a child.
I don't think that that was the intention of closed adoption. I think it really was about providing a home, but I don't think we had the space we do now to be in a support group or group therapy. There weren't any other adoptees that I really knew of besides my brother, so there wasn't anyone to talk to about it, and certainly I didn't bring it up with my parents that I was thinking, if I'm bad, are you going to give me back? My parents were very kind and loving, and I doubt that they would have given us back. But I think very common fear for adoptees from that era.
In your book, you talk about your mom having a temper, and one of the things that makes this book so masterful is that your readers can both understand how that anger affects children and also have some real empathy for your mom, because she is raising six children while dealing with heartbreak, and loss, and the pressure of creating the perfect Catholic family.
At that time, society was really putting all that pressure on adoptive parents, and parents in general. I remember being lined up in church, all of us, just in the most immaculate outfits – perfect hair, the whole thing – and we could not talk, or you got the evil eye from mom or dad, or an elbow, or you got taken out. Because what would the neighbors think? You know, what would your fellow parishioners think? There was a lot of pressure to be the perfect family, and that striving for the middle class was a lot of pressure on parents. In the 60s and 70s, they were all on the edge of making it, which is a theme in the book. Next year is going to be better. Next year we'll be able to move and maybe you all have your own rooms. Maybe. And it was attainable, but it was still not low-lying fruit on the tree. It was something that they had to work for, and we felt that pressure on them from society to provide a better life for all of us.
Did the way that you view your mom change when you started writing the book?
You know, it has changed, again and again and again. I tried to write honestly about what I was feeling at the time, going through those different stages with her, the fear of her temper as a child, and then as a teenager, the wanting to get out from underneath her thumb, the heartbreak of her emotionally abandoning us when she was grieving, and then her coming back to us again. And I think in putting the story together and coming up with the timeline, I really had more empathy for everything she was dealing with: the infertility, the family building, the societal pressure, the pressure from my father's family. She was mom. She was navigating a lot of things. What's interesting about talking about all of this is that memory is only so good, so I did a lot of collaborating with my twin sister and my mom in making sure what was in the book were the stories we wanted to tell, told the way we wanted to tell them, and it was a very heartwarming experience to do that with both of them. Mom was one of the first people that read the book, and, you know, I cautioned her ahead of time. I said, you know, I want you to understand, when a writer is writing a book, there's a character arc that we have to present. I'm not being unkind or cruel to you in portraying some of the things that I do, because what I want the reader to understand is this growth in our relationship, that developed over time, and the power of the personal struggle to overcome adversity and to be transformative and personal growth. That's what happens to her character, and also my appreciation of her as a mother writing about this retrospectively.
While you describe situations that were not good for you as a child, there's also a tremendous amount of empathy for your mom that comes through in that she is also situated in time and place in which she is expected to be a certain kind of person and live a certain way. There are a lot of secrets in your book, and the pressure of those secrets must have been unbearable.
The accusations against my mother? My parents protected us from it. They didn’t want us to know, and it’s interesting that in collaborating with her, that story came out. I said to her, are you saying you were accused of murder? And she says, oh, yeah, and then just continued the conversation. I called my sister and my brothers, and asked, do you guys remember this? And they all replied, we don't know anything about this. So some good things came out of collaborating with her. I think she felt better about it because we could now appreciate what she went through.
Grief is a persistent theme in this book, and one that resonates deeply with adopted people.
People have asked me about how I deal with grief – my husband passed away two years ago – and he's very front and center at the end of the book, right? It was an interesting experience to write about that romance and falling in love, while grieving at the same time – exhausting, but also liberating. And I think that if adoption hadn’t happened to my sister and I, and we hadn’t lost our sister, how I dealt later in life with grief would be completely different.
While none of us want to go through that – I would hate to use the word familiar – but it felt familiar enough that you pull the tools out of the closet and and already know what you need to get on with the day, or get on with tomorrow. And I think I learned that from my mom, watching her. I was speaking to somebody about this; the emotional abandonment we felt after my sister died was really, really tough stuff. And when my husband passed away, I was determined not to do that with my own children. I was very conscious about calling them every day, checking in, and I might be honest with them that maybe it was a sad day, but consciously not dragging them down with me because they were also grieving at the same time. Certainly where we are in life, with grief support groups and recognizing mental illness or a state of mind, you get more help readily. We didn't do that back in the 60s, 70s, or 80s. It was more like the title of Laura Engel's book, You'll Forget This Ever Happened. It was the same way for death. You'll just move on, just keep going. That's just the way we approached everything back then, and it wasn't healthy for anybody, and that was kind of the point of bringing up this terrible incident in our family history is to show people that this is how we dealt with things back then, and here's how and why you shouldn't do it. It doesn't help people going forward.
Books that look at how our culture worked at that time, and the societal norms that were in place then, are so critical to our understanding of adoption and adoption practices, and how we got to where we are now.
Yes, and I think what's interesting about writing the story was looking at how the family-building pressure at that time – that pressure to have as big a family as possible – which goes back to farmers making sure they had enough kids to help farm the fields, was both good and bad. The responsibility that my sister and I had put on us at an early age was overwhelming at times, and we resented it. Other people that I know that grew up in big families talk about the same thing. You know, there's no individuality. Everybody does the same activities. Everybody's enrolled in football and cheerleading. There is no carpooling. You got on your bike and you just got there if you want to go. And today's society is different than that. We coddle our kids more. We're careful about stranger-danger stuff. You know, back in my era, you didn't come home ‘til the street lights came on, and there wasn't a lot of accountability. Nobody was asking, where were you today? Basically, if you came home and you didn't have any scrapes and cuts, it was a good day. So family-building then and now is different, and it's fun for me to write about the differences: my kids learned a lot from reading my book. My daughter said, you know, Mom, this is family history that you wrote. I guess she is right. I guess it is a little bit of family history.
In your book, you talk about how you look back on uncomfortable adoption conversations you've had over the years, and that you think they have stuck with you because of unrecognized shame, and that concept of unrecognized shame for adopted people is a really powerful one.
Adoptees do talk about the stigma of shame. Back then the stigma and shame of illegitimacy of unplanned pregnancy was transferred onto the adoptee. We were deliberately placed in families so that we looked like the adoptive family. That was to make sure that we didn't stick out and people might say, oh, that child is adopted, because adopted meant illegitimate or came from a poor family that couldn’t keep them. And so those stigmas were transferred right over to the adoptee along with the idea that there was some failing back in our ancestral line that caused us to be adopted was not a concept I had the tools to deal with back then. Now I understand what the circumstances of my adoption were, because my first book was about finding my family history and meeting birth relatives, etc, so I now have more context to think about it. But back then, for sure, not. It was a real obstacle, to talk about it or to have anybody ask about it.
It was a happy day for my parents to have adopted us, but it meant something bad had happened first, in order for that adoption to happen. It is like a two-sided coin. Which side did we really want to concentrate on? We were taught to concentrate on the happy side. Forget about the ugly side.
It was so helpful to have my twin sister in the middle of that whole experience with me, because twins have that special language with each other. We would just look at each other and there was an innate knowing: somebody else understood the whole thing without even having to have a conversation, which was such a beautiful thing. And my (adopted) brother, who was two years younger than us, also got it. We were a little pack. We were not alike in very many ways with our brother, but the fact that we were in that same space of having come from somewhere else, landing in this nice family, but still trying to figure out our identity and where we belonged, really bound us to one another.
You mentioned that this is not your first memoir about adoption. Can you talk about the first memoir and why your story is broken up between the two books?
The story of that I wrote about in Twice the Daughter is about having a breast biopsy, and then my husband saying, you got to figure this out, because between my sister and I, we have six kids. I had no idea what I was walking into, that it was going to take five years to find medical history and my family background. I had no idea how hard it was going to be. My sister was with me on that path the whole time, and the crazy twists and turns of that journey, as I would tell people about it, they'd be like, are you gonna write a book about this? And I thought, well, maybe I could, so I had to learn how to write. I took writing classes at the University of Chicago and online. I landed into a memoir in a year program with Brooke Warner and Linda Joy Myers. Linda Joy is the president of the National Association of Memoir Writers, and Brooke Warner is the publisher of my first book.
So that book came out, and I felt good about writing the story. I didn't realize how the story – not so much my story, but the adoption search story – would be so helpful to other people. A lot of adoptees, said, oh, I didn't try that. I'm going to try that, because it worked for her. The book became a sort of how-to manual, and also a what-to-expect guide. I got a lot of outpouring of emotion and support and heard how much the book meant to other adoptees, but also birth parents and adoptive parents. I didn't have any idea that that's what adoptees thought about back then, and in the support group that I was in at Catholic Charities we spent a lot of time trying to speak honestly with birthmothers about what they were going through. My compassion for my birthmom is tremendous. I think the book spoke to everybody in the triad.
What happened after the book came out? People asked me, what was it like to grow up as a twin and an adoptee? And I thought, oh, gosh, I could write another book. That's how this one was born. That meant I had to go back and revisit a lot of stuff that is in this second book: my mother's anger, how I felt as a twin and an adoptee, and also what happened to my sister. And I wanted the book to start with my birthmom – her experience – and I also wanted to tie it into my experience as a first-time mom. So that's why the trajectory begins and ends with being mothers. The other piece of it was, there's these missing weeks that I discovered when I was writing Twice A Daughter – three weeks that my sister and I were at St Vincent's orphanage – that nobody could tell us what happened. Where were we? Who were we with? Who was caring for me? Those three missing weeks just nagged at me, and I ended up becoming very involved in Catholic Charities of Chicago. They do a fabulous job at keeping adoptees in touch, and we have reunions at Catholic Charities. And fortunately, there are some nurse-technicians that actually worked in the orphanage when I was there that are still alive, and they had written their own reminisces in a little book called St Vincent's, the Orphanage That Shined. I was able to go back through all of these resources and sort of reconstruct what happened to my sister and I for the first three weeks of life. And that meant so much to me and in my book it helps to put context with everything else that happens.
Writing is a courageous act. What advice would you have for other people in the adoption triad who maybe have a story to tell but aren’t sure what to do, or don’t feel like they're allowed to even tell it?
I wrote my story more like journal entries. For a long time, there was a little bit of the angry adoptee voice in there, and kind of the woe is me. And then as I started taking memoir writing classes, I realized, oh, I've got to put more context in this, and dialogue. I was doing that, but not with the intent that someone else was going to read it. That was some of the writing advice I had gotten: write like nobody's going to read it, first, and see how that makes you feel, and then decide, is this a story for just my family, or is this a story that I want to share on a bigger platform, The adoption community is so strong now, and there's so many female adoption writers, whether it's birthmoms or adoptees, and certainly so many different cultural adoptee stories that are fascinating to read – like Nicole Chung’s memoir – and it’s very encouraging, if we feel brave enough to put the story out there. A lot of people wait until their adoptive parents are gone to share the story, but there's so much healing that happens just from writing it down, even if it's not for public consumption.
I like to call this book my reckoning: reckoning with my life, and putting it in context and timeline, and collaborating with family members over? It was really a very healing journey. And so I would, offer that tip, just in general, as my daughter said, you know, this is like a little bit of family history. So it serves a lot of purposes. It was personal healing, relationship building with my sister and my mother, and then a healing journey too. So it serves a lot of purposes.
Julie's latest book, Twice the Family: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Sisterhood, debuts on February 4th, 2025, and is available everywhere books are sold. For more information about Julie, visit her website and don't forget to check out her blog. You can also find her on Instagram and Facebook.
