Relative Strangers: A Mother's Adoption Memoir

Relative Strangers tells the story from a birth mother’s perspective, divulging the attitudes of the times, the pregnancy and adoption and the search for her adult child and reunion in the late 80s and early 90s. An honest and detailed account of growing up in New Zealand in the nineteen sixties, and giving birth when societal expectations were that babies of single mothers should be given up for adoption. "Pip Murdoch has written a searingly honest memoir about growing up in the 1960s and what it was like to give up a child for adoption, in the face of limited choices and moral disapproval of unmarried mothers. The search for her son, years after his birth, is a poignant, often heart-breaking account of a search that reads like a page-turning detective story. Anyone who has been touched by the adoption triangle, and there are many of us in New Zealand, will find this a compulsive read, and be touched by its compassionate approach to every aspect of the process and the people involved, whether it be the adoptee, birth parents, or adoptive parents, and the legacy of the practice. Above all, it is an extraordinary and vivid testament to an era." ~ Fiona Kidman