HipBo Productions™ 
Coming Apart Together: Fragments From an Adoption
Coming Apart Together tells the true story of two teenagers from Long Island--of different classes and ethnic backgrounds--who meet by chance, fall in love, find their parents will not allow them to marry, and head off to college only to discover that they are going to have a child. The young woman is spirited away to a home for unwed mothers, gives birth, signs the relinquishment papers, returns home. In four years’ time, when they are old enough to marry despite their parents, they do. Over the next twenty-five years, the pair have five more children together. Their first child, adopted at three months of age, grows up in the knowledge that she is different because she is adopted and, as an adult, she begins the search for her birth family. She discontinues it out of fear and then, almost without reason, begins it again in 1998. In that same month, July of 1998, her entire birth family discovers the New York State adoption registry and they are, through it, reunited in February of 1999. This reunion is the impetus of Hipchen’s story, the cataclysm that begins it and ends it both.
Coming Apart Together recounts the stories that are necessarily part of any reunion experience, and meditates upon what those stories mean (or don’t mean). It is as well an imaginative exploration of what it may feel like to adopt a child, to be an adopted child, to give up a child for adoption, what it might be like to be the other mother, to find other relatives, to have a strange adult show up on your doorstep one day, claiming kinship. Though the plot creates interest, the real beauty of the text is in its language and its capacity for conveying to readers the difficult emotional paths of the birth parents, of their own parents and grandparents, of the adoptive mother and father, and of the adopted daughter at parting, in living apart, and in reunion.
Copyright 2009 HipBo Productions™. All rights reserved.
