Summary

As a child, Dani Shapiro used to stare at her face in the mirror, waiting to see another face beneath her own. Now, she is fifty-four years old, a wife, mother, writer, and teacher. She stares at her face in the mirror again and sees a stranger staring back at her. Over just one day, "the familiar has vanished" and she needs to tell herself again and again: "You're still you" (3).

Twenty-four hours earlier, Dani compared the results of her at-home DNA test to those of her half-sister Susie. She had been slightly surprised when her results revealed that she was only half Eastern European Ashkenazi, having been raised in a prominent Orthodox Jewish family, but figured there had to be a reasonable explanation for her Western European DNA based on the migration patterns of previous generations. She reminisces about her...