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American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America. This memoir travels across literal continents—and continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who’s won three Stanley Cups—and her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. This is not the whitewashed story, but the real story, where Beatty writes through complete erasure: loss of name and history, and a culture based on the currency of gratitude as expected payment from the adoptee. American Bastard sandblasts the exaltation of adoption in Western culture and the myth of the “chosen baby.” This journey into the relationship of place and body compels and unhinges, with the link between identity and blood history as its driving force. Beatty rescripts the order of things: the horizontal world of the birth table where babies are switched, the complex yard of the body where names and blood shift and revolt, and the actual story into the relationship of place and the insurrection of the body erased. Issues of class and struggle run throughout this book, this narrative river between blood and continents, between work and desire.
"American Bastard dares and succeeds at reimaging and redefining memoir as a genre where stream of consciousness meets essay, meets magical realism, meets reportage, meets poetry to create an epic mosaic only possible through the literary genius of Jan Beatty. And as if that weren’t enough, an enthralling yet gracious exposé about adoption that confronts and educates us through a voice that is at times tender and broken, at times angry and fierce, but always unflinchingly honest with herself, the people in her life, and her readers." —Richard Blanco, author of The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Memoir
“I don’t think I’ve ever read a book like this one. I hadn’t known some live haunted by their own blood ghosts. It will be medicine for those wounded by their own births and illuminating for anyone who thought they understood notions of home and kin. It’s as if Beatty’s lived homesick for herself. American Bastard is as brutal and beautiful as Beatty’s poetry. A surgery of the self. Precise and invasive, exploratory and celebratory, debilitating and transformational.” —Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street and A House of My Own: Stories from My Life
"Jan Beatty’s American Bastard starts with a threat—with razorlike prose, she backs you up against the wall of your naïve assumptions. A monumental work of wild innovative storytelling, wholly original, American Bastard would be unbearable in its pain were it not rendered with such exquisite craft and beauty. As a reader, you’re either in or out; I suggest you stay in for one of the decade’s premier memoirs." —Sapphire, author of Push and The Kid
"American Bastard has it all: dazzling craft, a resonant story, and an unflinching honesty, the essential ingredient transforming a work into a work of art. This deep dive into the emotional world of an adoptee and her struggle to find the missing and unresolved parts of herself left behind on the day of her adoption is at once disturbing and hypnotic. American Bastard is a balancing act, a hybrid work blending prose and poetry that threatens to unravel on the page as the author searches for her history, her identity, and her place in the world." —Nikki Moustaki, author of The Bird Market of Paris
"[A] blend of narrative and poetry that doubles as a searing critique of adoption culture in America." —90.5 WESA
"American Bastard is a powerful memoir by Jan Beatty, sure to draw the reader into better understanding another's journey. Jan provides a visceral walk in her shows, through which we all may recognize bits and pieces universal to us all, while also gaining a greater sense of empathy for the rough path others have had to tread." — John Busbee, The Culture Buzz
"It’s fitting that American Bastard proceeds by leaping, connecting, and separating since that is the form that Beatty’s life has taken. Her goal was to 'create an authentic voice, and to make the story as real and true as possible.' From one adoptee to another, it’s my pleasure to say that she succeeds." —Michele Sharpe, On the Seawall
"American Bastard is relentless, a page-turner that one can’t put down. I devoured it in nearly a sitting; I was so mesmerized by Beatty’s story. And though from the start, we are told not to try and place ourselves into Beatty’s experiences as an adoptee, what she achieves in American Bastard is as close as it gets to understanding." —Iris Dunkle, International Swans
"Jan Beatty’s American Bastard, winner of the 2019 Red Hen Nonfiction Award, is a blistering, take no prisoners account of adoption that may leave non-adoptees astonished and many adoptees shaking their heads in recognition." —Severance Magazine
"This is a necessary addition to the literature of adoption, to a side of the experience that goes too often untold." —Kristofer Collins, Pittsburgh Magazine