Unearthing

March 1, 2023

After the death of her father, Maclear discovered through DNA testing that that they were not biologically related. (Think Dani Shapiro's Inheritance.) While reconstructing her life, she asks the big-picture questions: What does it mean to be a family, and is inheritance just about heredity? From the author of the No. 1 Canadian best seller Birds Art Life. Prepub Alert.

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May 22, 2023
Novelist Maclear (Birds Art Love) meditates on genealogy and family secrets in this impressive memoir. In 2019, three months after the man who raised her died, Maclear discovered through a DNA test that he was not her biological father. She first sought the truth about her parentage from her Japanese mother, whose health was rapidly declining, but was forced to find most of the answers herself. In short sections named for the 24 seasons of the traditional Japanese calendar, Maclear unravels her family’s history, exploring how her surrogate father’s infidelity, her parents’ infertility, and her mother’s secrets influenced her own views on love and family: “Marital love is extreme. It is stamina,” she writes. “Marital love with complications or doubts is not a fiasco. It is a marriage.” Throughout, Maclear finds beauty in the natural world, tapping into interests, such as gardening, that she inherited from her mother: “I tend the soil for my sons now. In my mother’s shadow, I am learning how love vacillates.” As she uncovers previously unknown Jewish ancestry, she expands her understanding of her own mixed-race heritage, and the ways blood relationship have and haven’t impacted her sense of self. Maclear’s precise, hypnotic prose will appeal to readers of Margaret Renkl. This quiet story lingers. Agent: Jackie Kaiser, Westwood Creative.

June 15, 2023
Playing on metaphors from her avocation as a gardener, Maclear chronicles her discovery of "a secret buried for half a century." The author's Japanese mother closely held that secret until Maclear's English father died, after which she learned that he was not her biological father. The identity of the person who was, an older man about town in London who raced cars and owned a restaurant, surprised her, her old-country English identity replaced by a Russian Jewish bloodline with hitherto unknown siblings all over the world. That discovery prompted this pensive meditation on what lies beneath the soil of ancestry as well as the ways in which people attempt to find happiness and meaning in life. While her mother had never intended to be a "good cultural ambassador or an Elegant Japanese Lady," she did invest a great deal of herself in a wild patch of land that defied the minimalism of the idealized Zen garden. Maclear draws meaning from that habit of getting one's hands dirty in the Earth while pondering the thought that, as her mother said, a person becomes a person not just by remembering, but also by forgetting. Maclear's response, among many: "Dear parents, the deep knowledge you tried to bury and erase still managed to leave something behind." Though seldom snarky, the author is often indignant, working hard to muster the sympathy needed to understand why her parents would have disguised a long-ago affair. Many memoirs have examined issues of paternity and parental infidelity, but Maclear's stands out due to elegant writing and insightful musings on the making and shaping of identities, always with the garden behind her to provide an anchor. "I remember a filmmaker friend telling me we get new family in the middle of our life so we remember our identities are always dying and regenerating," she writes. "To remind us: we can be green again." A lovely meditation on the hidden past and the blossoming present.

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