In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history–the life she had lived–crumbled beneath her.

At this event Dani Shapiro will discuss her memoir Inheritance, exploring the urgent ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love.

Doors will open at 6:00 pm for the cocktail hour, and the talk will start at 7:00 pm. Hor d’oeuvres and light fare will be available to all as well as a cash bar. Tickets cost $45 and include a hardback copy of the book and a light buffet meal. Dani will sign books at the end of the talk.

Dani Shapiro is the author of the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Also an essayist and a journalist, Shapiro’s short fiction, essays, and journalistic pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of the New York Times, and many other publications. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, the New School, and Wesleyan University; she is cofounder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy.

Deborah Davis is the author of 10 books, including Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X; Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball; Gilded: How Newport Became the Richest Resort in America; The Oprah Winfrey Show: Reflections on an American Legacy; Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation, which won the prestigious Phillis Wheatley Award for best work of history in 2013 and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award; Fabritius and the Goldfinch, which Amazon named one of the Best Books of 2014; The Trip: Andy Warhol’s Plastic-Fantastic Cross-Country Adventure, and the memoir My Love Story, which she wrote with music legend Tina Turner.