To celebrate the launch of American Baby, Watchung Booksellers hosts author Gabrielle Glaser in conversation with singer-songwriter, author, and adoptee advocate Zara Phillips

During the Baby Boom in 1960s America, women were encouraged to stay home and raise large families, but sex and childbirth were taboo subjects. Premarital sex was common, but birth control was hard to get and abortion was illegal. In 1961, sixteen-year-old Margaret Erle fell in love and became pregnant. Her enraged family sent her to a maternity home, and after she gave birth, she wasn't even allowed to hold her own son. Social workers threatened her with jail until she signed away her parental rights. Her son vanished, his whereabouts and new identity known only to an adoption agency that would never share the slightest detail about his fate.

Claiming to be acting in the best interests of all, the adoption business was founded on secrecy and lies. American Baby lays out how a lucrative and exploitative industry removed children from their birth mothers and placed them with hopeful families, fabricating stories about infants' origins and destinations, then closing the door firmly between the parties forever.

Gabrielle Glaser dramatically demonstrates the power of the expectations and institutions that Margaret faced. Margaret went on to marry and raise a large family with David's father, but she never stopped longing for and worrying about her firstborn. She didn't know he spent the first years of his life living just a few blocks away from her; as he grew, he wondered about where he came from and why he was given up. Their tale--one they share with millions of Americans--is one of loss, love, and the search for identity.

Gabrielle Glaser is the author, most recently, of American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption, which tells the shocking truth about postwar adoption in America.  Gabrielle's 2013 book examining women's drinking and the American rehab industry, Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink -- and How They Can Regain Control was a New York Times bestseller. Her 2015 Atlantic story on science-based approaches to addiction was included in the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology of 2016.

She has covered the intersection of health, medicine, and culture for The New York Times and many other publications, including The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, Glamour and Scientific American, and is the mother of three grown daughters.

Zara  Phillips started her career as a backing vocalist in the UK for many 80’s pop bands and soon moved on to writing and working with her own bands playing in London. She moved to the USA in the mid 90’s and worked with Ted Perlman who produced two of her albums When the Rain Stops and You, Me and Us.

While mothering her three children, Zara began to write about her adoption experience, the lifelong impact, reunion, motherhood, addiction, and recovery. Zara’s book Somebody’s Daughter was published in the UK/USA in 2018. She released a new CD during the lockdown in May 2020 called Meditation & Kit Kats produced by Richard Thompson and is currently working on a new one-woman show.

Gabrielle Glaser, "American Baby"