Secret Identity

For forty years, JS Fairbanks didn't know who he was.

Conceived through donor insemination in 1942 - decades before the term "donor conception" existed - Fairbanks grew up in rural Louisiana believing the man who raised him was his biological father. He wasn't. The secret, kept by his parents on the advice of the medical establishment of the day, would quietly shape the entire arc of his life: a father who couldn't bond with a son who didn't resemble him, a mother who lived in chronic fear, and an only child left to make sense of a family that never explained itself.

At sixteen, JS fell in love with a girl in his hometown. They dated for eight years. She was his half-sister, and neither of them knew it.

He wouldn't learn the truth of his own identity until he was forty years old - and by then, the cost had already been paid: in a marriage, in his health, and in the violent death of his mother. Secret Identity is his unflinching account of what happens to a person, and a family, when a child's biological origins are hidden - and his case, drawn from decades of research and advocacy, for why this practice needs to end.

Part memoir, part reckoning, this is a book written by a man with nothing left to protect and everything left to say. For donor-conceived people still searching for language to describe their own experience, for parents weighing whether to tell the truth, and for anyone who believes children have a right to know who they are, Secret Identity is a difficult, necessary read of approximately 80 pages.