Does it matter where and under what circumstances you are born? What is really interesting is where life takes you. It is generally believed the outcome is based on choices made in life. While that assumption is valid for most, I don’t believe it’s the case for those of lowly birth who were removed from such an existence due to being adopted into more comfortable circumstances.

Taking into account my lowly birth in a far away jungle hut, who could have foreseen that world politics would play a hand in how my life unfolded and that I would grow up German, albeit in the country of my birth? After receiving a fine education, I became a fashion model and actress in Europe, married a handsome Irish American in Munich, and moved to the US, where I earned a doctorate and became a professor of cultural, art historical, and social studies at SUNY, Empire State College in Upstate New York.

It was often suggested I write about the “magical” story of my life, that it would make a great movie. But what seemed like a fairytale to others and to me at the time as well, was not necessarily so. When I initially sat down to write Split at the Root, I was already over 50 years old. I had undergone years of therapy that had taken me on a journey to retrieve from repressed memory what I knew about my birthmother. The primary reason for writing was the budding novelty to adopt exotic children into mainstream White American and European societies. For one or another reason, the manuscript did not get published, perhaps because those in the field were themselves adopting foreign-born children.

The themes in my book, offered from the perspective of the exotic child in a White world, are even more urgent to be explored today. So, I retired, and last year dusted off the manuscript and began to work on it again to present it to the world: a much larger world than would have seen it 17 years ago.

Split at the Root reveals how the magic carpet my adoptive mother so lovingly and carefully wove, could at times become a mangy rug to be cruelly pulled from under me, leaving me bereft, confused, and wanting on so many levels.