The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be

Starred review from January 30, 2023
Gibney strikes an intriguing balance between memoir and fantasy in this kaleidoscopic portrait that chronicles both her real-life childhood as Shannon Gibney and an alternate imagined life as Erin Powers, her birth name. After she’s born in January 1975, the biracial protagonist is, in reality, immediately relinquished by her white birth mother and adopted seven months later by white parents Jim and Susan Gibney. But elsewhere—in another dimension that the first-person narrator initially glimpsed through a wormhole in her mirror when she was 10—Erin lives, instead, with her birth mom and maintains close, if at times contentious, relationships with her extended family. What follows is an exploration of the subject’s identity as a transracial adoptee as examined through the protagonists’ differing—and sometimes eerily similar—lives across a nonlinear timeline. Collected letters and photographs from Gibney’s real life feature alongside recursive imaginings of who she might be if Gibney had grown up with her biological family. Asking the question, “Who was that girl, and who is she now?” this richly textured telling fills in the blanks “with scraps of speculation” where personal histories remain unknown. The result is a fantastical, transcendent memory collage that shirks convention in search of what is real and true about familial bonds. Ages 14–up.