The New York Times, Sunday, April 25, 2004

IN PERSON

The Parent
Not Chosen

After an Adoption Gone Wrong
A Hoboken Novelist Puts Pen To Paper

By DEBRA GALANT

In "Girls In Trouble," Caroline Leavitt sheds a harsh light on adoptions in which prospective parents meet and then befriend young birth mothers.

In real life, conflict and trauma aren't much fun. But fiction would not be anything without them. So when Caroline Leavitt tried unsuccessfully to adopt a child in 1998, she did the next best thing: she turned her experience into an article on salon.com and then into a novel.

Already in its third printing, "Girls In Trouble" (St. Martin's Press, $24.95), which came out in January, deals with an "open adoption," in which prospective parents meet and often befriend the teenage birth mother. In Ms. Leavitt's book, things do not go well. Ms. Leavitt and her husband, Jeff, Tamarkin, who edits Global Rhythm, a world music magazine, did not get nearly as far as the adoptive parents in "Girls In Trouble." After giving birth to their son, Max in 1996, Ms. Leavitt contracted a rare blood disorder and almost died. Because she could not have any more children naturally, she and Mr. Tamarkin tried to adopt a child when Max was 2.

The couple ended up retaining the services of an adoption lawyer, who taught them the elaborate process involved in open adoptions, which starts with winning the attention and trust of a pregnant teenager. In a process almost as complicated as applying to college, Ms. Leavitt and Mr. Tamarkin were instructed to write a letter introducing themselves ("on blue paper, it's considered warmer," Ms. Leavitt explained), put together a photo album, get an 800 number and then advertise in a national newspaper for a pregnant teenager wanting to give her child up for adoption.

Nancy Wegard for The New York Times

"You had to do this photo album to present yourself in the best light," Ms. Leavitt said. The album was then "edited" by their lawyer to take out pictures that a teenager might not like. Ms. Leavitt was extensively coached on what to say should a pregnant teenager call. At the beginning, "you say something nice about the birth mother," she said. "So we said, 'We know how difficult this must be.'" They gave the process about a year and received 60 calls, but few negotiations got past the initial inquiry stage and none yielded a baby. "It just got too hard, talking to people and hoping," Ms. Leavitt said. "I really took it personally. I got off the phone and said 'Why aren't they choosing us?"

That experience wound up being chronicled on salon.com in an article called "Dating the birth mother." In it Ms. Leavitt compared open adoption with the kind of gamesmanship and posturing usually reserved for the world of singles: waiting for the phone to ring, not coming on too strong; not asking tough questions; appearing more attractive than you really are. She quoted a paralegal who coached her through the process: "Get her to like you. Then maybe she won't mind so much that you aren't all she's dreamed of. Think of it as a first date." The paralegal also advised Ms. Leavitt not to tell the birth mothers that she and her husband were Jewish. "Instead of naming your religion, say you're spiritual," the paralegal said.

There were bizarre inquiries, like the call from a young man who said that his 17-year-old stepsister was expecting a baby and that he was the father. There was also the one from the 22-year-old who said she was carrying twins and had an inoperable brain tumor. She never called back. And they had no way of tracking her down. "They had our 1-800 number but we never had their number," Ms. Leavitt explained.

All the rejection was disheartening. "We were stunned that we weren't chosen," Ms. Leavitt said. Even after it was over, the phone calls kept replaying themselves in her imagination. "I couldn't get those girls out of my mind," she said. Ms. Leavitt-who grew up in Waltham, Mass., and moved to Hoboken in 1992-is no stranger to tragedy. Nor is "Girls In Trouble" the first book she wrote to get through a personal trauma. In 1986, two weeks before she was to have been married, her fiancé of four years died in her arms of a heart attack. "I took our savings and went cross-country, talking to anyone I thought might help-rabbis, priests, mediums, mystics, palm readers, anyone," she said. In the end, it was writing a novel, "Living Other Lives" (Warner Books, 1999) that helped her move on.

And to write her way out of a bad place this time, Ms. Leavitt, who has produced several novels for young adults in addition to eight adult novels, focused on the neediness of the young expectant mothers. Instead of talking about what kind of mother she would make for their unborn babies, the women wanted to talk about things like makeup and clothes. "They wanted to talk about teenage stuff," she said. "They wanted almost to be part of my family. They wanted me to adopt them."

So it was that she began to build the character of Sara Rothman, a Harvard-bound 16-year-old living in the Boston suburbs, who falls for a teenage bad boy and becomes pregnant. Sara is in denial until it is too late for an abortion, and when she decides on an open adoption, she falls in love with the adoptive parents, Eva and George Rivers, who seem much hipper and looser than her own parents.

The novel, Ms. Leavitt said, started with a "what if?" What if a pregnant teenager fell in love with the adoptive family and they fell out of love with her? Which is exactly what happens. When she's pregnant, Sara visits Eva and George every day, hanging around their house and being treated like a princess. But once the baby, Anne, is born, Eva has less time to mother Sara and eventually begins to resent her presence.

Because open adoption is such a prickly subject, Ms. Leavitt has since the publication of "Girls In Trouble" found herself in the midst of a sometimes contentious debate. She asked to have a special e-mail address put on the book jacket, and has so far received about 120 letters. "I respond to all of them, even the hostile ones," she says. When she was interviewed on National Public Radio in January, callers and e-mailers weighed in on all sides of the issue-some questioning her authority to appear as an expert on the subject. One listener from Baltimore asked in a stinging e-mail message during the show, "Caroline, whose needs are being met by having an open adoption? I think this is terribly confusing to the child and when the child decides to leave and go live with the biological mother, then we will see how good it is."

"Adoptive parents were upset and birth parents were upset," Ms. Leavitt said. "It really surprised me how emotional it was." She also said the controversy surrounding her book had changed over time. Before it came out, she got e-mail messages from birth mothers who seemed worried about how the birth mother in the book would be portrayed. But since publication, she said adoption agencies have become more critical and birth mothers have embraced the novel. On Amazon.com, "Girls In Trouble" has picked up 46 reviews and a five-star rating from the reviewers, the highest possible.

A more personal review came from a mother writing into www.adoptionforums.com in January. "It was a hard book to read because it touched me so much," said the reader, who identified herself only as Darcy. "I cried and I felt so connected to the birth mother. It was a novel, but it was one that I think a lot of us can relate to."