Book Reviews
FINDING MY WAY
A MEMOIR OF FAMILY, IDENTITY, AND POLITICAL AMBITION
Robin F. Schepper
Girl Friday Books (Apr 18, 2023)
Hardcover $28.95 (396pp)
978-1-954854-96-3
Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5
Written with gravitas, the memoir Finding My Way is about leading a purposeful life and imparting knowledge with dignity and honesty.
Robin Schepper’s memoir Finding My Way interrogates the past to nurse ambitions for the future.
Schepper was born in California in the 1960s. Her mother was a flight attendant for Pan Am; the father’s name listed on her birth certificate was incorrect. The mother-daughter duo moved to New York to live near Schepper’s German grandmother, a masseuse whose studio offered other services too. As a result, Schepper’s childhood was full of secrets and unknowns. In adulthood, adherence to truth became her mission.
At school, Schepper lobbied for more sex education. During college in California, she tried to locate her father. Using her German skills and air travel habits, she studied and lived abroad too. Later, she worked on political campaigns (including Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative), planned big events (like the Olympics in Greece), and ran a communications firm, in addition to getting married and adopting two sons. After learning about her biological father, she reconciled with the mother and grandmother whose traumas hurt her but gave her grit.
Revealing secrets and dispelling the associated shame, the book shares difficult stories about hasty moves, family conflicts, and colorful dating experiences. Its momentum is strong, and its prose has a spontaneous quality—both candid and conversational, marked by exclamations, soul-searching, and entertaining anecdotes. But its use of superlatives compromises its otherwise convincing explanations of its positions. And the book’s chapter titles, which feature repeating dates, interrupt its natural, chronological flow, while the included photographs, which are inserted in the middle of the book, don’t all make sense until the book is complete (and some spoil later surprises).
The political arenas in which Schepper worked end up coloring and sharpening the text. Determined to find out the truth about her past, she wound up fighting for transparency in democracy too. She was prompted to end relationships based on her own desires for independence and to support her aspirations. Further, during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Schepper’s painful memories of abuse were triggered, leading her to pursue justice. Indeed, she used her personal history to chart a vision for the future. Without dwelling on mistakes, the book works toward a hopeful ending with lessons that are applicable to other seekers too.
Written with gravitas, the memoir Finding My Way is about leading a purposeful life and imparting knowledge with dignity and honesty.
Reviewed by Mari Carlson
November 28, 2022
Jo Guest (Reviewer) has just submitted Feedback for Finding My Way.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Full Text:
Enjoyed reading this book about a little girl who you grow up with as you read it. She is resilient and determined well above her age. It is not surprising she ends up with a very prestigious job working in the White House.
FINDING MY WAY
A Memoir of Family, Identity, and Political Ambition
Author: Robin F. Schepper
Review Issue Date: February 15, 2023
Online Publish Date: January 21, 2023
Publisher: Girl Friday Books
Pages: 396
Price ( Hardcover ): $28.95
Publication Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 9781954854963
Section: NonFiction
A political operative recounts her long struggle to find her biological father.
Schepper, born in America but a German speaker until entering school in Manhattan, was raised by a single mother who “was called a bastard child in the Catholic Church” because she gave birth to her daughter out of wedlock. Her mother, an international flight attendant, was always vague about the father’s identity. (In an intriguing passage, Schepper speculates on her mother’s relationship with the Indonesian dictator Sukarno: “If Dr. Sukarno had been successful in his advances toward my mom, she might have become one of his wives—and I would have never existed.”) The author’s grandmother ran a brothel, which required Schepper’s intervention when Nana was back in Germany and “some of the girls wanted to do house calls to make more money, which was against Nana’s rules of operating her business.” Work in the film business and then politics followed, with Schepper always on the lookout for clues and DNA that would establish the facts of her parentage. The clues her mother left were unhelpful, but Schepper proved to be an adept investigator, stymied but never broken by a long chain of dead ends and false leads. Unfortunately, some of the matters that she would have profitably spent more time on go by in a flash, such as her service in the West Wing as the head of Michelle Obama’s program to encourage young people to exercise. Where she could go deeper into the inner workings of political campaigns, the writing often falls flat: “I worked the event in Boston for election night, when Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush. It was hugely demoralizing, as we all feared how Bush would lead our country.” Adoptees and those in search of birthparents may find the example of Schepper’s perseverance to be inspiring, but a handbook for political advance work it’s not.