Giles Scott

What does it take to find the parts of one’s self—identity, belonging, worth—that seem to be missing?

 

Giles Scott grew up in the north of England surrounded by loving parents and siblings—a very normal, very middle-class world to be proud of and grateful for. Underneath all this, however, lay a longing to understand a different kind of world—a world where his mother gave him up for adoption, where classmates ridiculed his red hair and below-average stature, where his closest friends bullied him. 

 

The means for him to understand such a world didn’t begin to emerge until well into adulthood, living a new chapter of his life in California, working as an English teacher, and becoming a new parent to two adopted children, a ten-month-old daughter from Taiwan, and, then, eight years later, an infant son from Kansas, U.S.A. 

 

In learning how to be a father to adopted children, while also beginning the search for his own birth mother, Scott finally began to piece together the missing parts of his own self. If In An Echo is a book about adoption, about alienation, and about being caught between real and imagined identities. But, ultimately, it’s a book about love, about parenting and family, about belonging, and the struggle to find ways to heal the internal fractures that so often define us.