I picked this up almost reflexively, after all, I've loved Alther's fiction and I'm a big fan of the memoir. However, this meandering philosophical search for Alther's genetic heritage didn't suit me at all.

To be fair, I do have a dog in this particular hunt. I suspect that because my own child's parentage will always be 50% unknowable mystery, I bristle a little when people assign importance to ancestry. I tend to err on the side of who you are does matter and who your ancestors were doesn't, so once Alther began to explain how hugely important knowing particulars of her heritage is to her, she began to lose me.

I found much of the book to be wildly discursive and only intermittently interesting. It just wasn't for me, though I think that the more genealogically inclined would dig it.