Blood Strangers: A Memoir

Katherine A. Briccetti

A powerful and nuanced tale about the search for family

Blood Strangers is a captivating, multigenerational story of an alternative family. In her memoir, Katherine A. Briccetti writes about three generations of missing fathers: her father's closed adoption in the 1930s, her own adoption by her stepfather in the 1960s, and finally, the "second-parent" adoption of her sons by her partner in the 1990s.

Fascinated from an early age by the holes in her family tree, Briccetti takes it upon herself to search for her father's birth parents. As her search begins to reveal more tantalizing clues about the family she never knew, she is forced to confront her own tenuous relationship with her two fathers—the father who gave her up as a little girl and the stepfather she struggles to connect with in her adult years. But when she forms her own family with Pam, her longtime partner, Briccetti learns that families can be made under many different circumstances.

Advanced Praise

"Blood Strangers is a book about the different ways families come together, fall apart, and come together again, healed by the power of love. Briccetti has written a moving memoir with a sure hand and a strong heart.""

"...an interesting delving into nature and nurture, and how they intertwine and intersect in one woman's life."

"...reads like a novel and spins from the heart, examining three generations of children fatherless by choice or chance with a mother's loving eye and a writer's chiseled prose."

Photo by Meredith Stout

About the Author

Katherine A. Briccetti’s work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies. She was awarded a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2009. She earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the Stonecoast program of the University of Southern Maine. She works as a school psychologist and writer/editor in the Bay Area. An excerpt from Blood Strangers was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2007. She can be reached at kathybriccetti.com.