Wednesday, May 20, 2020, 8:00am – 9:00am
Presented by Dani Shapiro
In track Opening Session
After a lifetime spent writing fiction and memoir about the corrosive power of secrets within families, Dani Shapiro stumbled upon a massive family secret of her own: her beloved father was not her father. As she writes in Inheritance: “I always knew there was a secret. What I didn’t know: the secret was me.” The presentation will delve into Shapiro’s own detective story as she discovers a radically different truth than the one she had known, and shines a spotlight on the complex, ethical ramifications of this moment in history, during which science and technology have outpaced the human heart’s capacity to contend with what we may discover.