It is that time of year where I live when the rains fall, the sun sets early, and getting cozy with a good book makes for a perfect indoor adventure.
For those not familiar with my writing, may I recommend my first-of-its-kind, public-health-centered adoptee memoir. My work, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, provides insights into my own journey and those of nearly 3 million others like me born in United States the boom adoption years after World War II, through the late 1970s.
I intentionally wrote my story to provide as many facts as possible, and a detailed bibliography, to challenge the all-powerful myth that post-1940s U.S. adoption has become. My untangling of that venerated myth reveals how poorly understood the U.S. adoption experience remains, even as adoptees globally continue to publish personal accounts that remain largely dismissed and ignored by the public, by lawmakers, and by the media from all political spectrums.
If you are a reader who enjoys a challenge, who may not be afraid of the truths that are carefully concealed by powerful systems of myth-making and even our own natural desires to prefer myth to the complexity of truth, you may be ready for joining me on my adventure.
Here is how Gonda Van Steen, Kings College professor and writer who exposed the shameful chapter of the Greek overseas adoption experience, described my work in her review on Goodreads: “This is a one-of-a-kind adoption book written by an American born in Michigan in 1965. With clinical precision, the author, Rudy Owens, walks the reader through the 1960s mentalities, systems, laws, and networks that keep the adoptee apart from his or her early life history. The author does not mince words and speaks with precision and without sentimentality about what needs to be done–and urgently– to abolish the discriminatory place in society in which the adoptee who does not have access to birth and adoption records is still held. This book lays out a method for how to search, how to ask for documents, how to process setbacks, and how to come out stronger–for the collective, not just for oneself. Very warmly recommended!”