Holloway, Sara

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Holloway, Sara

PERSONAL:

Female.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Granta, Crown House, 72 Hammersmith Rd., Hammersmith, London W14 8TH, England; Granta Books, 2/3 Hanover Yard, No1 Rd., London N1 8BE, England.

CAREER:

Writer and editor. Granta Books, senior editor.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Family Wanted: True Stories of Adoption, Random House (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

A senior editor at Granta Books, Sara Holloway is also the editor of Family Wanted: True Stories of Adoption. In this book, Holloway assembles stories from the three groups most intimately involved in the adoption process: the adopted children, their birth parents, and their adoptive parents. Contributors from each group focus intently on what their role means, both to themselves and to the others in the process. With twenty-four essays and two pieces of fiction from contributors such as Bernard Cornwell, Jeanette Winterson, Robert Dessaix, and Tama Janowitz, the book covers the wide range of powerful emotional reactions to adoption, the turmoil at finding out one is adopted, and the reconciliations with self and others that often occur later in life. Calling the work a ‘fine anthology,’ a Publishers Weekly critic noted that ‘the volume finds its power in the intimate, often searing details of each story.’ Bernard Cornwell, for example, points to his adoption as a source of profound unhappiness throughout his life, made worse by the dysfunction at the core of his adoptive family. Mirabel Osler describes the traumas of adopting and transplanting a child from another country and another culture. In contrast to these stories, A.M. Homes describes how his birth mother set out on a relentless and determined course to locate him. For writers such as Daniel Menaker, chance and deliberate choice are just as likely to create a well-rounded and happy family as biology and genetics. The book provides readers with a ‘rare chance to fold yourself into a book that can get a little too close for comfort in reflecting some of the deep emotions of an often hidden issue,’ commented reviewer Tracy McVeigh in the London Observer.