Chosen (28 page)

T
his story began in college, a trail of experiences and opportunities that shaped a novel. In 1995 I was a year from graduating when I connected with a Harvard professor who wanted an aide worker to go into a Romanian orphanage and hospital where her own adoption was stalled. I went alone, not knowing the language or the social complexities that had created a country where most orphans were not without parents, just abandoned to a state-run foster care. I only knew I loved babies and travel, adventure. It was overwhelming (I was given
fifty
infants my first day), and heartbreaking, nearly impossible for me to leave Bucharest to finish my degree, but I did.

After receiving my bachelor’s in social work, I couldn’t stop thinking about adoption, about the circumstances surrounding brand-new life that will shape it forever. At the end of several years abroad, I applied for a position at an international adoption agency in Portland and ended up as the director of their U.S. program, the sole caseworker juggling birthmothers and waiting families. I fell in love with both the city and the heady allure of a job so full of promise.

Like Chloe Pinter, I went into it with the intention of creating happy endings, magic families, joy from sorrow. Similar to when I stepped off the plane in Romania, I quickly scrambled to learn a new language and subculture; the business side of adoption. But as the months passed, I got too attached. I cried and raged at some adoptions that fell apart, and just as painfully for some that went through. When
I left the adoption world, it was just as the nurse at one of my clients’ births had predicted. I wasn’t able to do the job when I had children myself. My skin had become too thin.

Faced with our own pregnancy and an unexpected diagnosis at our first son’s birth, I pondered some of the deeper issues that formed the backbone of this novel. How does parenthood change you? How will the challenges you face shape you as a couple? What happens when your expectations of parenthood are so far from the reality? What makes a good parent? A good person? What happens when you get what you
thought
you wanted?

All of these courageous people whose lives had touched mine so intimately rattled around with me as I adjusted to that first year of new parenthood. Driving home from a predawn airport run, exhausted from getting up to hang bottles for my newborn’s feeding tube, I stopped to get gas at a filling station not far from the very place where a child was abducted in my hometown twenty years earlier. Knowing this, I still fantasized about not lugging the car seat and its precious cargo out with me just to run in for a bottle of water…. But what if I didn’t?

The idea for this novel was born out of that single scene. A mother so exhausted her judgment lapses; a grief-stricken father who takes advantage of this. The story is fiction—characters and settings and scenarios are as though I took a handful of experiences, seasoned them with the salt of my vivid imagination, put it all in a bag, and shook it up—but the themes are real, from my own life, from the message boards, from those I have been privileged to witness and maybe, even from yours….

I wanted to tell a story in which there are no heroes or villains, just shades of gray, real people trying to recover from their stumbles with grace.

I invite you to visit my Web site to talk more about the characters and questions raised.

www.chandrahoffman.com

M
y thanks…

First to Sally Kim and Maria Massie; editor and agent who have also been, in turn, rudder and map, critic and cheerleader, reader and friend.

Also to Maya Ziv and Rachel Vogel, for all that they do behind the scenes.

Paraphrasing E. B. White, it is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good
reader—
Linda Davis is both. May our Sunday Morning Cross Country Writers Club for Two live on!

To Leonard Chang, who mentored me, remembered me, and welcomed me back ten years later.

To the Bryn Athyn Police Department, who protect in many ways and in this specific case protected me from embarrassment.

To my mother and sister—MFA entourage, sounding boards, and village for my children.

To my father, who challenged me by refusing to read female authors. Old dog; new trick.

To Hayden, Macrae, and Piper, for your patience and inspiration. Let the adventures continue!

To my family, the immediate, the Grand, the in-laws, the extended, and the sisters-in-spirit: I can feel you all on the sidelines with your pom-poms—it means the world.

Finally, to Jonathan, for riding this wonderful ride with me.

Jacket photograph © Getty Images