Immediately, she shut down, but reality just won't quit. She noticed that her relationship with her adoptive mother and her adoptive mother's with her biological children were different. She had a persistent desire to please her adoptive mother and felt persistently guilty when she did not. On the other hand, her adoptive mother's biological children treated their mother with casual disrespect. Her bio-Dad (as radio advice maven Dr.

Sarah Saffian's life had been a fulfilling one. Then her birth mother called. ITHAKA: A Daughter's Memoir of Being Found

Basic, 303 pages, $33.50

'Somewhere in my flake of sun, there is no one." When Sarah Saffian was 9, she found a note on her breakfast tray, left by her adoptive father, that said that while she was sleeping the night before, he had heard her say: "Somewhere in my flake of sun, there is no one." Poignant, no? Adopted children face the dilemma of human-beingness or lack of beingness sooner, sharper, harder (and are less armoured when they do) than the rest of us. That's why so many of them are either very very successful or very not successful, and that is one of the reasons why the adoption story, particularly the reunion part of it, proves an enduring fascination.

In Ithaka: A Daughter's Memoir of Being Found , Saffian, a New York writer, takes us through the process of her discovery and eventual acceptance of her birth parents, who, when she was 24, tracked and found her. Brought up in New York by successful, cultivated and loving adoptive parents, Saffian had gone to Brown and Columbia and was working as a junior reporter at the Daily News, when one morning her birth mother called. She remembers walking out into the streets; there was a halo around everything, everyone had fresh-washed hair and gleaming, eager faces, and her life had, without her will, terribly and unalterably changed.

She resented it. She was happy. She was in love with a new man. She adored her adoptive family. She did not want to integrate a bunch of strangers into her life, another entire family, as it turned out, for after some trauma her birth parents had married and she had three blood siblings. More than anything, she did not want to face her anger and sorrow at being abandoned.

Immediately, she shut down, but reality just won't quit. She noticed that her relationship with her adoptive mother and her adoptive mother's with her biological children were different. She had a persistent desire to please her adoptive mother and felt persistently guilty when she did not. On the other hand, her adoptive mother's biological children treated their mother with casual disrespect. Her bio-Dad (as radio advice maven Dr. Laura calls them) told her that when he first received photographs of her, he (a 6-foot, 4-inch adult male) curled up on the living room floor in a fetal position and wept for hours. She found this very, very uncomfortable, for she is, she discovered, just as emotional and expressive as he, and had repressed this part of herself for 24 years.

Saffian, who had never had a bad year, or even, it appears, a bad month, cracked up. It took her a long time, since she had been so together and so good. But despite her iron discipline, she was hurled into terrific nightmares about exclusion and abandonment. To stop them, she tried therapy. She quit. She wanted to curl up and be taken care of, she regressed, in fact, as far as possible, to childhood. Then painfully, she began to grow up all over again.

She did not rush out to meet her eager, anxious, birth parents. She stalled. She said no more phone calls. No photographs. Only letters, then she forgot to write back, sometimes for six months. She felt invaded, she didn't want them to "ache to share with her." She didn't want them to look up her photograph in the Brown yearbook, and told them she felt exposed when they did. She turned the table on her biological parents, abandoning them over and over again. But as they stuck to her, and refused to go away again, she started to fall in love with them. She carefully picked away the covering of their lives, and started to understand and feel compassion for what happened to them all.

Saffian's gift to the somewhat limited literature of adoption is her ability to be sensitive to her chaotic emotions and follow close on with analysis. Her language is sometimes lyrical, but more often precise and laced with resentment as she catalogues the changes she was forced through. I respected (finally) her bravery in revealing herself as a spoiled princess whose palace had been stolen, especially when three years after that first phone call, she climbed her way out of her abyss and got on the train to meet these people, who had chosen not to abort her, had suffered pathological worry for 24 years, who had sought and found her and exposed themselves to her.

I respected, in the end, that she found it in her heart to love them, not as a needy half-formed creature, but as the adult self her birth parents' discovery of her had forced her to become. Saffian is a fortunate woman to have two sets of parents, and anyone involved in what is called the adoption triad (adoptee, both sets of parents) should read this book. Each reunion is as different as the individuals involved, but Ithaka is a magnificent template and guide for the many inevitably to come. Even more, the book is a courageous chronicle of a woman who fights every millimetre of the way for maturity, and triumphs.

Contributing reviewer Elizabeth Nickson lives on Salt Spring Island, B.C. She was happily reunited with her birth daughter more than three years ago.