The Adoption Papers

"I think The Adoption Papers is written with great affection. I think one of the things about Jackie Kay is her huge warmth and the depth of her understanding. I think it’s really interesting that she’s able to see the perspective of three different women all at once, so she intercuts the perspective of each, whereas in the other books, it’s more the woman seeing it from her own point of view. Jackie Kay’s got this huge generosity of spirit so she can see it from three different points of view. It’s heartbreaking how honestly she has the two mothers speaking. What an ability that is — to see into the mind of your mother with such sympathy in the way that she does. I had never thought of the thing that she writes about her adopted mother, saying, ‘telling the world your secret failure, bringing up an alien child’. For Jackie to be able to see and accept the agony that her mother felt about not being able to have her own baby before she decided to adopt – that, I think, is a really huge ability. The description of her birth mother was terrible; having to live through the scandal after she’s given her baby away, digging a hole and burying her baby’s clothes. That was a heartbreaking image. And then that line she has, ‘now my secret is the hush of heavy curtains drawn’. You can just picture that in Scotland of the time, which I can remember, you just don’t talk about it. Of course in my era children who were adopted were not told they were adopted. One of my friends, she was annoying the next-door neighbour when she was 11, and the next-door neighbour was so annoyed with her that she told her she was adopted, to punish her. And that’s how she discovered she was adopted. You can imagine, that really messed her up. She went home and she said to her mother, ‘You never told me I was adopted.’ So much of our lives were lies. I think that’s in several of the books, that people are living lies, and these women are all saying you have to be truthful."