Detachment
An Adoption Memoir
- Publisher
- Freehand Books
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2014
- Subjects
- Adoption & Fostering, Literary, Personal Memoirs
- Categories
- Author lives in Manitoba
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EPUB Accessibility Specification 1.0 AA:
http://www.idpf.org/epub/a11y/accessibility-20170105.html#wcag-aa
Accessibility summary:
This title is a well-marked up and structured book, which is fully accessible. The images of this book are well described and, when necessary, short alt texts and/or extended longer descriptions are provided. This ebook passes Daisy’s Ace WCAG 2.0 Level AA checks
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eBook
- ISBN
- 9781460404553
- Publish Date
- Sep 2014
- List Price
- $10.99
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Description
In 2005, Maurice Mierau and his wife, Betsy, travelled to Ukraine to adopt two small boys, age three and five. After weeks of delays while navigating a tangled bureaucracy, they returned to Canada as a proud new family of four. Now what? Does fatherhood begin the moment that the adoption papers are signed? Is family something that is created in an instant? And what happens when everything seems to be on the verge of falling apart? In Detachment, Maurice Mierau probes not only the process of adoption but what comes after—the challenges of becoming a family, the strain on his marriage. While his son acts out and gets in trouble at school, Maurice feels removed, detached, thinking instead about his own emotionally distant father. Also born in Ukraine, Maurice’s father has a traumatic and mysterious past of his own. If Maurice can come to understand his father’s life, perhaps he can start to make sense of his new sons… Detachment is a moving, darkly funny, and searingly unsentimental memoir about learning to become a father and a son.
About the author
Born in Indiana, Maurice Mierau grew up in Nigeria, Manitoba, Jamaica, Kansas, and Saskatchewan, and now lives in Winnipeg. You can watch a video trailer for Detachment: An Adoption Memoir (Freehand Books) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=g9n-HmUJTyA. Maurice is also the author of several books of poetry, including Fear Not, which won the ReLit Award in 2009, and his first collection, Ending With Music (Brick Books, 2002).
Awards
- Winner, Kobzar Literary Award
- Short-listed, Manitoba's On the Same Page
Editorial Reviews
“It’s a book that doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges of building a family across borders, with children who acutely remember what it’s like to have been abandoned. It also lays bare the sometimes-unanticipated impact on marital relationships, on a person’s confidence in themselves as a parent.”