Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Register of Adopted Children’ – and it took four emails to find out. I did know what ‘redacted’ meant, but I wondered if other people did (can’t you just say ‘the edited version’?), and I wondered what such a cold and formal letter does to people in the heated and upsetting process of looking for your other life.
    As far as the court is concerned, adoption records are nothing more than an archive with legal implications, and are attended to in the dead and distant language of the law, obeying protocol that is difficult to follow. That isn’t a good reason to engage a lawyer; it is a good reason to make the process simpler and less insensitive.
    I wanted to stop. I wasn’t so sure I had wanted to start.
    I was lucky though, because I had fallen in love with Susie Orbach. We were quite new but she wanted me to feel that I was in a safe place with somebody who would give me support and, very simply, be there for me. ‘We are together,’ she said. ‘That means you’ve got rights.’ She laughed her big bold laugh.
    I met Susie some time after I failed to interview her for her book Bodies – about the impact of advertising and pornography on women’s bodies and self-image.
    My father had died, and all work had to be put aside. Eventually I wrote to Susie, just to say how much I had enjoyed her book – all her books. I had read Fat Is A Feminist Issue when I was nineteen. I had been rereading her Impossibility of Sex , and thinking I would try and write an answer to it – in the broadest sense – called The Possibility of Love .
    I am always wondering about love.
    Susie invited me to supper. She had been parted from her husband for about two years, after a thirty-four-year marriage. I had been by myself since Deborah and the breakdown. I was beginning to like being by myself again. But the big things in life are never planned. We had a very good evening; food, conversation, the sun setting behind her beech tree. I thought, ‘She looks sad.’ I wonder if I did too?
    Over the next few weeks we wooed each other in fonts and pixels – an email courtship that couldn’t be happening, I thought, because Susie was heterosexual and I have given up missionary work with heterosexual women. But something was going on and I had no idea what to do about it.
    I had lunch with my friend, the writer Ali Smith. She said, ‘Just kiss her.’
    Susie went to talk to her daughter in New York. Lianna said, ‘Just kiss her, Mummy.’
    So we did.
    In the place of trust with her I felt I could keep going with my search. Adoption begins on your own – you are solitary. The baby knows it has been abandoned – I am sure of that. Therefore, the journey back should not be done alone. The terrors and fears are unexpected and out of control. You need someone to hold on to. Someone who will hold on to you. That’s what Susie did for me day by day. Others of my friends did their part. Whatever else, the crazy time, and the adoption search, taught me to ask for help; not to act like Wonder Woman.
    I had confided my fears to my friend Ruth Rendell. Ruth has known me since I was twenty-six, and she lent me a cottage to write in when I was trying to make my way. I wrote The Passion in her house. She had been the Good Mother – never judging, quietly supporting, letting me talk, letting me be.
    She is a Labour peer, and therefore a member of the House of Lords. She knows a lot of people and she thought she could help. She summoned a few baronessess for a private discussion, and the consensus was that I should proceed with the utmost caution.
    I am well known in the UK and if I was going to meet my mother I wanted her to meet me, not my public profile. And I could not face the newspapers getting hold of the story. Oranges is an adoption story, and Oranges is the book that is identified with me.
    I may be paranoid but it is justified paranoia. I have had journalists stationed in my garden to ‘discover’ my girlfriends, and I fretted that some journalists would be only too happy to ‘discover’ lost mothers too.
    So I just didn’t feel comfortable filling in a form and putting it in the post and going and telling my story to a social worker – a mandatory requirement in the UK, if you want to open a closed adoption file.

    My search was complicated by the fact that prior to 1976, all UK adoptions were made on the basis of closed records. Mothers and children alike were assured of lifetime anonymity. When the law changed,