Recycled

A Reluctant Search for True Self Through Nurture, Nature, and Free Will

By: Jack Rocco

Narrated by: Michael Neeb

Jack Rocco was a baby when he was adopted by a blue-collar, Italian American family. Today a successful orthopedic surgeon, Jack’s identity was built around his Italian heritage, and while he knew the story of his “Gotday,” he didn’t know the story of his birth day. His was a closed adoption, and he only knew that his birth parents were a young couple—an Italian father and a German Irish mother—who couldn’t afford a child.

Recycled takes you along on Jack’s journey of discovering his true but hidden identity. On a first date, Jack learns she was also adopted. As she describes finding and meeting her birth mother, Jack discovers that his belief about closed adoptions—that there's no way to obtain details—and the birth story he's been told may not be accurate. He becomes obsessed, devouring books about adoption and adoption trauma. He tries to follow long and twisted tentacles of nurture, nature, and free will—which parts of him were due to genetics? The nurturing environment of his adoptive home? And which parts did he actually have control over?

As some of the puzzle pieces of his life click into place, others remain disconnected and swirling out of reach. And then, he makes a discovery that shatters his very self-identity.

It was Jack’s grandfather who coined the term “recycled children.” Recycled is for those directly involved in adoption—adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents—and also for anybody wanting insight into the impact that early maternal and cultural separation has on a child. It is also for those coming to terms with mixed-race identity.

It’s one of the most thrilling, shocking, yet hopeful books about hidden identity and adoption that you’ll listen to this year, and may help you during your own identity inquiry.

©2023 Jock Rocco (P)2023 Jock Rocco

I am an adoptee and I don't feel so alone anymore

I didn't love the narration, but the story was so good. Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us. I am excited to see what I uncover next 🙌

A valiant effort of reckoning with the unknown and the unclear.

Jack Rocco does an amazing job painting a picture of his life and sharing his thoughts and feelings of imagining he may have absorbed his twin early on. He describes how he finds himself living in a mystery of who he was and if he was “good” Jack, or “bad” Jack. Maybe he was both? Who would he have been if he had grown up with his biological family? Which was more important—nature or nurture? Jack shares his thoughts by asking and exploring all these poignant questions. And as he writes, there just aren’t any easy answers. His search for answers is honest and real. I would have loved it if Jack had narrated his own story so that the emotion could have radiated from the source. However, it’s an engaging adoptee story to help amplify adoptee voices and to speak to his lived experience of coming “out of the fog” of being an adopted person and moving into “adoptee consciousness.” The result is showing the reader how Jack Rocco has found his true identity by accepting the mystery and totality of all of who he is.

Emma Stevens
Author of The Gathering Place: An Adoptee’s Story and A Fire Is Coming