The Inner Sea - by Kate Stapleton (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

An exceptionally honest and emotionally precise memoir about a birth mother and the daughter she didn't raise--an intimate portrait of motherhood in all its forms, and the long, winding road between letting go and finding each other again.

For readers of Educated and Maid, this stirring memoir traces one woman's path from a deeply religious off-the-grid upbringing through heartbreak, reinvention, and an unexpected reunion decades in the making.

When Kate Stapleton becomes pregnant in the midst of an unstable and destructive relationship, she is forced to make the most impossible decision of her life: placing her daughter for adoption. In the years that follow, Kate rebuilds from the ground up--working in orchards, studying the harp, falling in love, becoming a mother again, and slowly learning that grief and joy can live side by side.

Then, years later, her firstborn daughter attends college just an hour away from Kate's home. As mother and daughter begin to forge a relationship of their own, Kate must confront the question that has shaped her life: What does it mean to love a child you didn't raise?

Read this unforgettable memoir to witness a hard-won story of love, loss, and reunion that expands our understanding of motherhood.

Review Quotes

"The Inner Sea moves like a folk song. Its images return as refrains, changed by everything that has happened between their appearances. Water becomes womb, lake, distance, and passage. Music played for an unborn daughter returns in the daughter's own songs. Migration carries both leaving and the possibility of return. Kate Stapleton has written a memoir that understands something folk songs have always known. What we love can drift far from its source and still carry the sound and motion of where it began."
(Iliana Regan, Michelin-star chef and author of Fieldwork)

"Farmers' market stands overflow with tomatoes, maple trees spill sweet sap, peaches roll in city streets, grocery store workers take to the stage in Shakespearean plays, grand harps resonate, daughters unfurl mothers' full skirted wedding and ballgowns, a school bus unfolds into a home for eight, and, page after page, The Inner Sea offers an expansive vision of where beauty can be found--and created. The characters, setting, coincidences, and loves in this book seem, at first, too rich to be real, yet the book's subjects, such as the sources of our food and the roots of our families, are some of the most essential. Stapleton writes of wisdom with levity, of unique personal experience with inclusivity, and of sorrow and loss in a way that manages to make the reader feel rapturous."
(Rose McLarney, author and winner of the National Poetry Series for Its Day Being Gone)

"Kate Stapleton is a magician, a conjurer, a builder of worlds. With her sinuous prose, she submerges the reader deeply inside her beautiful, heartbreaking, heartwarming journey. The Inner Sea is a book I will never forget."
(Mesha Maren, author of Shae)

"There are as many stories about adoption as there are adoptions. No two are exactly the same. But every story matters. Every story has the potential to change a life. And some stories have the potential to change many lives. Kate Stapleton's story is one those stories. Told, with both beauty and honesty, The Inner Sea lays bare the great brokenness that adoption can leave in its wake. But it also does what many other stories don't do. It points the way to wholeness, showing how time and grace can piece together lives that are more beautiful, not less, because of the brokenness they endured. For adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, those interested in adoption, and everyone who loves a really good story, The Inner Sea is a must read."
(Emily Stimpson Chapman, bestselling author and adoptive mother of three)

"They say that a grief shared is a grief lessened. In a world that is continually refilled with stories of suffering, The Inner Sea shares it's particular type of grief with such warmth and hope that it is thereby lessened, transformed into something hope-giving itself. Stapleton writes with an emotional poetry that it deeply moving."
(Victor M. Sweeney, author of Now Departing: a Small Time Mortician on Death, Life, & the Moments In Between)

About the Author

Kate Stapleton is a harpist, dancer, theatre and film producer, and author. She grew up in the driftless ridges of Western Wisconsin, composing soap operas while hanging laundry on the line. She has consistently found herself barefoot in the big city and wearing four-inch heels in the barnyard. She spent several years running a theatre company, unloading trucks of produce, getting lost in the mountains on the way to photograph farmers with secret stores of moonshine, and living in a cabin with no plumbing. To her surprise, she currently loves living in the big city of Pittsburgh with her husband and their six children. She placed her first child for adoption and shares the story of how that choice led to her current life touring musically in a 40-foot bright blue school bus in her memoir (also an award-winning documentary film), The Inner Sea.