The title of this memoir and the cover picture, showing a pretty girl with brown skin and hair and dark eyes walking along an urban street hand-in-hand with a neatly dressed white woman, captures the theme of uncertain identity. The story begins in mid-twentieth-century Australia, when, under the government’s assimilation policy, children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent were still being removed from their families. Lorraine McGee-Sippel was not stolen from her family by the authorities, but was surrendered for adoption by her eighteen-year-old mother.

As Lorraine grows up, her desire to find her natural mother and discover her origins (which she mistakenly believes, until her late thirties, to be a mix of white Australian and black American) becomes all-consuming. This desire is obstructed by the lie that her adoptive parents were told by social workers and that is repeated to Lorraine at the moment of crisis that opens the story. The scene should have been a joyful one: the announcement of Lorraine’s engagement. Instead, her adoptive father says: