Lost and Found

This essay revisits my earlier work on the intersections of adoption, relationships, performativity, and storytelling. Some years removed from adopting a child, learning about my grandmother's adoption, and writing how relationships are made in the performance of stories, I reconsider the power of texts that tell us into and out of being. Using pluralized voices-differences in form and mode of exchange and address-I write to show how identities and lives are performed in relation to others. Through modularity, I use repetition to show how more-or-less discrete forms and scenes happen again and again not only in accounts of our lives, but also in our identities and relationships. Specifically, I write in and through a series of changes, losses, and discoveries: the death of my grandmother, the disintegration of my marriage, the decision not to adopt another child, the forging of a new queer identity, and the gifts that a return to writing these stories provides.