You Don't Look Adopted cover art

You Don't Look Adopted

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 Months Free

£5.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Get this deal
Offer ends on 15 July 2026 at 11:59 BST.
More purchase options

You Don't Look Adopted

By: Anne Heffron
Narrated by: Anne Heffron
Get this deal

£5.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £11.94

Buy Now for £11.94

Can writing your story save your life?

I should have come with a manual. My parents thought they were getting one thing when they adopted me - a baby of their own - when what they got was a human being with a story of her own.

As a child, I traded safety for silence.

As an adult, I had no idea who I was, why I quit nearly everything I started, why I struggled with things that came more easily to my friends (jobs, relationships, finances, self-esteem), why I seemed hell-bent on throwing myself away.

It got to the point where I didn’t care if telling my story was going to kill me: I was going to find a way to tell it, because living a life that felt like a lie was unbearable.

In order to write this book, I moved away from everything I knew, maxed out my credit cards, borrowed from friends and family, had lots of sex with strangers. Nearly penniless, I was living like a millionaire in the apartment of a fabulously famous writer. I was finally listening to my own voice. I ate cheesecake for dinner and fell in love with the East Village. I broke almost every rule I ran into because I was afraid this kind of freedom couldn’t go on forever. As I wrote, I lived every day as if it were my last.

I was in for such a surprise.

©2018 Anne Heffron (P)2019 Anne Heffron Parenting & Families Relationships Adoption
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
All stars
Most relevant
This is an amazing book. It must have taken huge courage to actually write it. I think you need to be an adoptee to truly understand precision with which the writer targets those nuances and the things that we find hard to name or to understand let alone verbalise. So many exquisitley observed descriptions of the subtle differences in the way an adoptees world of attachment is altered. I find it hard to pick just one but maybe one that comes up early on in the book - wanted babies born into a family and the space in that family is theirs. An adopted child comes to a family who have already made that space, maybe they couldn't have children of their own, but for whatever reason they adopt, the space is already created and the adoptee has to adapt to fit it. This leaves the child in a permenat state of high arrousal as they look for signs that they are filling the space and delivering what the parents want, in order to get the love and acceptance that they crave. I have worded this very badly - so read the book and it will be better explained. This is a book that needed to be written and I am so grateful for the insight and understanding that it has given me into my own adoption. I don't feel so alone anymore.

A must read for adoptees.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.