When you are adopted, the urge to know and tell your story can make it hard to focus on the life you have. You can think that once you do know your story, once you do tell your story, you will find yourself, and your real life can finally start. But what happens when you risk everything to share the story of your life, and things don't go as you might have hoped? What happens when you tell your story and your life as you know it falls apart because you didn't have a backup plan?

Maybe you become real.

With the help of fellow adoptees Hannah Andrews, Dawn Conwell Mulkay, Leah E. Cooper, Brad Ewell, Shelley Gaske, Sharon Stein McNamara, Andrew Glynn, Tonni Johnston, Kathleen Shea Kirstein, Elisa Nickerson, Kristen Steinhilber, Kimberly Van Den Hoek and other special guests, To Be Real gives you a many-voiced picture of what happens after you lose your mother when you are very young.

The book is full of typos and errors because it is real. If it were polished and edited, part of the heart of the adoptee experience would have been erased. So many people don't tell their stories because they are afraid of being wrong, afraid of being judged. It's okay to make mistakes. Just keep moving forward. You learn as you go.