Twice a Daughter

A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging

By: Julie Ryan McGue

Narrated by: Katie Hagman

What does it mean to grow up without a sense of who you are and where you come from?

Julie is adopted. She’s also a twin. Because their adoption was closed, she and her sister lack both a health history and their birth parents’ names - which becomes an issue for Julie when, at 48 years old, she finds herself facing several serious health issues.

Julie’s search for her birth relatives spans five years and involves a search agency, a PI, a confidential intermediary, a judge, an adoption agency, a social worker, and a genealogist. By journey’s end, what began as a simple desire for a family medical history has evolved into a complicated quest - one that unearths secrets, lies, and family members that are literally right next door.

©2021 Julie Ryan McGue (P)2021 Julie Ryan McGue

Critic reviews

“Twice a Daughter is not just another tale of an adoptee's search for truth. This is a story about the discoveries that searching for the truth reveals, how it sets you free and offers the gift of love.” (Linda Joy Myers, founder of the National Association of Memoir Writers)

Couldn’t put it down

Beautifully-written memoir with incredible twists and turns. Narrator did a great job as well.

A Journey to Embrace

Julie Ryan McGue’s book, “Twice a Daughter,” is a beautifully told story of how she and her twin sister endure a long and arduous road to finally being able to retrieve their adoption records. Hearing of the many trails she faced to obtain her own records (records that many feel should be available to all persons) depicts just some of the obstacles that face adoptees. Julie’s perseverance and strength of character prove to be just what she needed in order to discover her medical history and other important adoption truths.

Why so many five star reviews?

Apparently I am the only reader wondering where the emperor’s clothes are. Every review I read was five star. Really? I found the story compelling but cringeworthy. I wish it was fiction. For a 50 year old woman to have zero capacity to see anything touching her life from anyone else’s perspective besides her own is staggering. She is cautioned by social workers at many points along the way to try and understand where others such as her birth parents, their spouses or their children, and even her adoptive parents are coming from, but at every turn she expresses that her personal desires are superior to their needs or desires. Whatever hurts she may uncover or cause, she expresses that her own rights are more important. Everything is about her, regardless of the chaos she may detonate in anyone else’s life. Spoiler : when her brother contacts her at the end, instead of her contacting him and dropping a bombshell of information about his ( their) father, I was so relieved. In spite of proclaiming that all she’s interested in is medical history, even after she has received it she plans to disrupt a whole family’s life by contacting the son of a man with a past that even he himself may not have known about, potentially wreaking havoc between father and son., just to fulfill what she can only see as her inalienable right. That doesn’t happen, thankfully. The son comes to her first, alerted by his father.

The perils and heartaches of the search process itself are instructive and enlightening. The social workers along the way who worked tirelessly to discover long hidden facts deserve high praise. I could wish that they counseled her to accept the feelings of others as legitimate rather than always taking the position that her own feelings are the only consideration.

The fixation on finding characteristics in the previous generation that are manifested in her children is puzzling. If one of my children had a habit of being late, for example, I think I am in pretty shaky ground if I blame that on genes passed down from two or three generations previous, as she is seeking to do. Nature over nurture to a ridiculous degree.

I’m glad she found most of what she was looking for. The astonishing turn of events at the end is so unbelievable that a fiction editor would require it to be made more “ realistic.” I’m glad for her in that regard. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction!

Wanted to Like it More

I was genuinely intrigued by the story line of Twice A Daughter but found the writing simplistic and the protagonist shallow. The author gave us plenty of surface details but I didn't come away with a strong sense of who these people were at their core. To be fair, I listened until the end because I wanted to know the outcome. but I can't say it was because I felt compelled to know the destiny of these characters. I also didn't enjoy the narration, though I guess the voice/tone suited the protagonist in that it was kind of sharp and a bit whiny.