Tree of Strangers

Like many adopted children, filmmaker Barbara Sumner yearned to know who her mother was. New Zealand's closed adoption laws made that almost impossible and coloured her chaotic adolescence and adult life. When she finally tracked her mother down, a longed-for reunion ended in tragedy. This remarkable, moving, beautifully written memoir explores Sumner's conviction that everyone who loses their mother suffers some degree of physiological damage. They are all grafted onto the tree of strangers.

Table of Contents:

1 Better call Maysie – 9
2 Cold enough to cut your hair – 19
3 God fights back – 27
4 The Australia? – 35
5 Another kind of memory – 43
6 The changeling – 51
7 And the dolphins walked on water – 59
8 The opposite of Easter – 67
9 You are an electromagnetic field – 75
10 Abraham and Isaac went up a hill – 83
11 Husband, father, painter, paperhanger – 91
12 Wondering where the lions are – 99
13 How many times can you change your name? – 107
14 A cosmological view of time – 115
15 Hear the cry for home – 123
16 Oh so lucky – 131
17 Your limbic brain on relinquishment – 139
18 Sort of an orphan – 147
19 Your phantom baby – 155
20 Clarence Street forever – 163
21 The snob – 171
22 The cloth mummy – 179
23 Spooky action at a distance – 187
24 Game of statues – 195
25 Land of light – 203
26 All reasons, preferably special ones – 209
27 You are your DNA – 219
Notes about adoption – 225
Notes – 233
Further reading – 235
Acknowledgements – 236
Author’s note – 237

Barbara Sumner has worked in film and journalism, and manages Cloud South Pictures with her husband, Tom Burstyn. In 2009 This Way of Life, their feature documentary about a family living simply in the Ruahine Ranges, won the Berlinale Generation Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, was shortlisted for an Oscar, and won awards at film festivals around the world. In 2020 Barbara is a graduate of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. She lives in Napier.

It packs a wallop.

A rare window into the inner questions one asks around identity, family, right and wrong, which, if you are anything like me, will leave you reflecting on your own journey for some time to come.

Barbara Sumner’s Tree of Strangers is, through her sharp intellect and exquisitely cinematic writing, a book of ... social and literary importance.