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Praise for Coming Apart Together: Fragments from an Adoption:

In a narrative that is both personal and analytical, that combines the deeply painful and confusing events of the past with mature inflections and informs them with a rare complementary understanding of both self and literary genre, Emily Hipchen has captured the doubly troubling and ambivalent identity of an adopted daughter. Though the book is never sentimental, the lyrical, moving, and always intelligent voice of the author surrounding the many striking vignettes of childhood, youth, and maturity conveys her love and longing for each of her mothers and each of her fathers, both because of and in spite of her penetrating insights into and empathy for each one’s struggles with the acceptance and rejection of parenthood. Read this book if you want to understand and experience the tangled knot of love, anger, self-doubt, and courage at the heart of adoption memoirs. Out of the pain and confusion that have always accompanied the author’s quest for identity and self-worth has come this striking and beautifully written book, a landmark in adoption autobiography in particular and in the wider range of memoir as a whole.

---Rebecca Hogan, editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

Emily Hipchen’s Coming Apart Together gives us vital and poignant perspectives on both adoption and autobiography.  Negotiating her ambivalence toward the family that adopted her while recovering a fulfilling relationship to her birth parents, Hipchen reclaims aspects of her identity long suspended by loss, grief, and shame.  What emerges from her book is a personal voice of extraordinary honesty and persevering love.

---William Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English, UNC-Chapel Hill

Growing up in a closed adoption, Emily Hipchen was suspected of being pregnant when she was a twelve-year-old virgin, and was told that because of her genes she couldn’t feel love. In this vivid, beautifully written memoir, she looks backs with rediscovered anger and bountiful compassion, imagining the lives of her adoptive parents and siblings and the multi-generational birth family she found at the age of 35. She makes up and revises stories about all of them, and realizes how much she will never know for sure. Although she doesn’t present her relationship with her new-and-old family as simple, she gives an unforgettable picture of experiencing physical resemblance and accepting her body for the first time, and, even more importantly, of longing for unconditional love and finding it.

---Marianne Novy, author of Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture (2003) and Reading Adoption: Family Difference in Fiction and Drama (2007).