I Must Have Wandered: An Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls

I Must Have Wandered: An Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls

An infant surrendered in the aftermath of World War II. A closed adoption one year later by a military family already in motion. From this rupture, she builds a hybrid epistolary memoir that moves across the decades, tracing what survives when origins are severed and reinvention is imposed.

In lyrical, precise prose, she renders the imprint of early loss: the primal confusion, the tangle of privilege and displacement, the adolescent anxiety sharpened by Cold War discipline and a father's intelligence work. Coming of age in the 1960s means navigating identity without the anchoring fact of blood or birthright. Adulthood brings the drive to recover what was taken, but without original records, the search stalls. Determination and hearts win when mother and first family are finally found. 

Decades later, DNA and the internet converge, and what follows is discovery: siblings, heritage, the texture of a life that ran parallel to hers all along. This is a book about what it costs to be split from yourself, and what it takes to become whole.

Mary Ellen Gambutti writes fiction as Islay Corwin. Her debut Novella in Magical Realism exploring themes of loss, identity, and heritage through an adoptee's perspective is The Garden Between Worlds:  A Tale of Magic and Identity