title: An Affair with My Mother: A Story of Adoption, Secrecy and Love
author:  Caitr&iacute;ona Palmer 
description: <DIV>&quot;Palmer . . . &#160;writes very movingly of the dislocation of the adoptee.&quot; &mdash;<I>Sunday Express</I></DIV>
zlib_text: [Acknowledgments](Legacy_toc.html#ackn-1)
  
  Wendy Sherman, my agent, once again gave me the irreplaceable benefit of her
  experience and judgment. Rob McMahon, my editor, worked diligently to help me
  make this book what I wanted it to be.
  
  
  
  
  
  **Previous novels by the author**
  
   _The Prosecution_
  
   _The Defense_
  
   _The Judgment_
  
  
  
  
  
  [One](Legacy_toc.html#chap-1)
  
  
  When they finally divorced, my mother told me that she had married my father
  only because she had been pregnant with me. My mother made this remark as if
  it were something she was sure I knew already. She seemed to have assumed that
  I must have understood—from the beginning, as it were—that she had never loved
  him and had lived with him all those years only so that I could be raised in
  the proper way. I was not nearly so intelligent, and nothing as insightful, as
  she wanted to imagine. It had never occurred to me that there was anything
  wrong, anything unusual in the way we lived. If my mother and I went away
  every summer, it 