Strange how the idea for a novel came and grabbed me unawares, so that when in 2009 I started with the idea of a young man’s journey in search of his sperm donor father, I almost unwittingly committed to spending over 10 years grappling with the question of how much it matters to establish a connection to people who have provided part of your genetic make-up but have had nothing to do with your upbringing.
The central story in my soon to be published novel, RIDING THE HIGH ROAD, has its origins in my own experience of conceiving a child using donor insemination. As a single lesbian in my late thirties recovering from a long illness, having a child became a now-or-never priority. Having several friends with children conceived in this way, I saw no reason why this shouldn’t be possible. Women I knew had used a whole range of ways to find a sperm donor, from registered sperm banks (which from the late 1980s were starting to be accessible for lesbian and single women), to finding donors informally, asking friends, brothers of friends, work colleagues etc. These informal arrangements varied enormously from using a go-between to preserve a certain amount of anonymity for both parties, through donors who agreed to be known but not involved with the child, to men signing up for varying degrees of parental responsibility. At the time, the only safe way to guarantee anonymity for a donor was through a clinic, where only anonymised basic information was made available to the parent and child. Until, of course, there was a chance of being traced through the widely available family heritage DNA testing. Who’da thought that would be a thing, back in the days?
But putting that aside for a moment, in the mid-1990s my preference was for a known and, if possible, involved donor. Apart from the obvious advantages for a single woman with variable health of an involved donor/dad sharing some of the childcare, I did also feel that a child might appreciate at least having the potential to know their biological father, similarly to how many adoptees value the option of being able to trace their birth parents. And to this day, despite being a committed atheist, I will bless the miracle of the chance conversation between my friend and a gay man acquaintance of hers that led me to someone able to step up and be not just sperm donor but a brilliant dad to our son and support to me. HOWEVER, I have always acknowledged that such men do not grow on trees, have witnessed several women trying and failing to find such a person, and I would have accepted any kind of donor, including going to a clinic. My obsession with having a child far outweighed any concern for the traceability or not of the sperm donor.
Fast forward then to 2009 when the idea for RIDING THE HIGH ROAD was born. By then my son was aged 12, and we had been living for 4 years with the man who became my husband, and his daughter. With no questions about my son’s biological origins, and the donor well established as his dad, my only concern had been to ensure that he knew we had chosen to make a baby in a way that was different from the norm, and that this was not something that had to be hidden. I achieved this by mentioning his different conception as soon as he started asking where he came from (aged about 3) and he duly accepted this without any difficulty. So, back to my original question, what made me embark on a novel with a central plot of a young man’s search for his biological origins and exploration of why this should matter to him?
What caught my imagination was a story I heard of a lesbian couple who had used a semi-anonymous donor with an agreement that he could be traceable by the child at the age of 18. The child at 18 did duly trace him, only to be told that the donor didn’t want any contact. Somehow this stuck in my mind, as a kind of what-if scenario for my own set-up, thinking of how that would impact a donor conceived young adult. I imagined it would feel like having a half open door slammed in your face, harder perhaps than knowing from the start that the door could never be opened.
And so, into this set-up I created a world for my characters of lesbian single mother Pat, and her donor conceived son Gethin, with the opening inciting incident of Pat presenting Gethin with some details of his sperm donor father on his eighteenth birthday. Both, in their different ways, question the relevance of this information to where they are now, but Gethin goes on to seize it as an opportunity to escape his dissatisfied drop-out existence and increasingly fraught relationship with Pat. Gethin’s decision to search for his genetic father in NW Scotland quickly becomes a vehicle I use for a much wider exploration of a range of parenting experiences and the need to move beyond our parents’ legacy whatever our background. This also applies to biker-girl adoptee Jez, who becomes Gethin’s travel companion, as well as to the older generation of Pat and Don (Gethin’s biological father). But as an adoptee Jez really has more to deal with in processing the trauma of being separated from her birth mother at a very early age, and then the emotional fall-out from nursing her dying birth father. The main lesson that Gethin learns through his journey is that his current preoccupation of contact with his biological father needs to be set in the context of those people who, like Jez, some of his friends, and the homeless young man he meets along the way, have all had to grapple with very difficult consequences of how they were brought up.
In the past few months, while working on promoting the book ready for its release this autumn, I have focussed on networking more with my local writing scene, and through this have connected with Jane Ellis from the Donor Conception Network (DCN), who expressed an interest in having DCN review my book. An organisation approaching its 30th anniversary, DCN offers information and support to parents and their donor conceived offspring from a wide variety of family set-ups and reasons for having used donor conception. Amongst their many resources is the book Archie Nolan: Family Detective by Beverely Ward who runs the Writers Workshop in Sheffield (hence the connection).
I met with Jane for an interesting discussion, which included me learning that 2023 is the first year that 18-year-old donor conceived young adults are legally able to trace the donors, following a change in the law in 2005. This is a significant shift from the pre 2005 position of guaranteed anonymity for donors and will have changed the narrative for parents of children born after 2005 quite significantly. Hiding the nature of their children’s conception is no longer a viable option for parents, and DCN has been able to support parents to find ways of having this conversation with their children. Of course, as Jane pointed out, the wide availability of DNA testing has now blown the whole issue out of the water, giving older donor conceived adults at least a chance of tracing their genetic parents. Meeting Jane brought me to my original question: Why does genetic origin matter to donor conceived people, and why did I choose this as a topic for my novel?
Jane has rightly pointed out to me that donor conceived adults differ enormously in their response to being donor conceived: from many not being the slightest bit interested in knowing about, or making contact with, their genetic relative, through others being mildly curious, to those who feel very strongly that their sense of identity will never be complete without such knowledge. But perhaps the value our still patriarchal society places on biological over social connections plays its part in this imperative. I imagine there is also an element of the attraction for many children of ‘what if’ scenarios of alternative parents, particularly compelling if they have issues with their own parents. Perhaps the existence of a genetic alternative provides a concrete vehicle for donor conceived children to explore this common fantasy. Gethin is entranced by his discovery of his biological father’s ancestral link to a Scottish Laird in the NW highlands, and this provides him with a fantasy escape from his drop out existence: ‘I drift into this scenario…moving swiftly to a whisky drenched welcome with tales of the ancient clan.’ For Gethin there is also a simple curiosity once presented with the information: ‘I literally can’t let it rest, like, the idea he exists. I don’t even know if I care but I might as well try?’
Jane lent me a book: Inheritance, by Dani Shapiro, a memoir story charting the author’s intense psychological journey after taking a DNA test on a whim, aged 54, and discovering that her Orthodox Jewish father is not her genetic father. Shapiro was conceived in an age when anonymity and secrecy around donor conception were the norm, resulting in the shock of finding out that her now deceased parents had not been completely honest with her. And although her confusion was compounded by her strong Jewish identity, it was the lack of openness that sent her spinning onto a journey to uncover the truth about the set-up her parents bought into, as well as finding the donor. Shapiro’s account brings home the importance of openness from as early an age as possible to minimise unnecessary distress for donor conceived children. But it may well be for many that once the information becomes available, there is a journey that has to be travelled before a donor conceived person can decide how much it matters and move beyond their parents’ legacy to achieve a true rite of passage. This is the journey I have set up for Gethin and have begun to understand for myself in the process.
Meanwhile my book inches closer to its launch in October. My video interview, author conversation with Fantastic Book’s Mary Brown, and reading of my first chapter, are all ready for the online launch. And I’m somewhat erratically trying to build my author profile.
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Penny Frances 