Permanent Home: A Memory Collection

In this lyrical collection of memoir essays,  Permanent Home, Mary Ellen Gambutti traces the contours of a 1950s and 1960s childhood shaped by adoption, military life, and the search for belonging. From her birth in South Carolina, the nuns who fostered her until an Air Force couple from New York City adopted her, loving Manhattan aunts and uncles, to her grandmother's warm kitchen and garden in New Jersey—the family's Permanent Home. Gambutti writes with tenderness and precision about Tokyo friendships and classrooms, Air Force bases, and car trips, north and south. She gathers the memories that formed her, of the places that never quite held her, and the adoptive parents who loved her in the only ways they knew how. Woven throughout is the quiet ache of the adoptee; the search for a face in the mirror, for a family that looks like her own, and a place she can truly call her home.