Laureen Pittman
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Laureen Pittman is a paralegal by profession. She worked for lawyers and law firms large and small for over 20 years after graduating from college with a degree in political science. She also happens to be adopted.
Laureen started blogging about her journey to discover her identity in 2013. As her own story began to evolve, she realized that there was a much larger truth that needed to be explored and shared. She wanted to bring her story to life—not just for herself and her family, but for other adoptees who yearn to learn their own truths and for families touched by adoption who want to understand and value the heart and soul of an adoptee. You can find her on-line at www.adoptionmytruth.com. Laureen’s writing on adoption has also been published on the blog, Secret Sons and Daughters – Adoptee Tales From the Sealed Records Era (http://secretsonsanddaughters.org). Laureen's memoir, The Lies That Bind: An Adoptee’s Journey Through Rejection, Redirection, DNA, and Discovery, was released in February 2019 and was an Independent Book Awards Finalist, also in 2019. Laureen lives in Southern California with her husband, two sons, and three cats. When she’s not writing or cat-herding, she’s usually barefoot and in the kitchen (because she hates wearing shoes and she loves cooking).
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The Lies That Bind: An Adoptee's Journey Through Rejection, Redirection, DNA, and Discovery
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Memoir
The Lies That Bind chronicles Laureen’s adoption journey and weaves together the stories surrounding three main events: 1) her birth in a California women’s prison and adoption into a middle class family in Southern California; 2) the challenging search for her biological mother as a young adult in the pre-computer 1980s; and 3) the unexpected one-in-a-million DNA match thirty years later that led to meeting her biological father and discovering their shared family legacy together. As with most sealed-records-era adoptions, the truth about Laureen’s birth in a California women’s prison in 1963 was carefully hidden and considered a shameful thing that happened to someone else over fifty years ago. But Laureen would not accept that some people still believed that the past should be hidden and denied in the name of "privacy," or to protect certain individuals from exposure to personal embarrassment, or a truth that would destroy some perfectly crafted life created out of secrecy, lies, and denial. Laureen stitched together her history—one that started in the psychedelic sixties and ended up in a future where DNA could solve mysteries. She never imagined that spitting into a plastic tube would reveal the answers to her identity. 
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