Ann Fessler is a Professor Emerita at Rhode Island School of Design, where she taught from 1993 to 2018. She has spent nearly four decades creating work that deals with the stories of women and the impact that myths, stereotypes, and mass media images have on their lives and intimate relationships. She has spent the last twenty-five years bringing the first-person narratives and hidden history of adoption into the public sphere through her writing and visual works. She turned to the subject after being approached by a woman who thought Fessler might be the daughter she had surrendered forty years earlier. Though the woman was not her mother, Fessler, an adoptee, was profoundly moved by the experience. The conversation that ensued shifted the focus of her work to adoption and she has since produced three films, several audio and video installations, and written The Girls Who Went Away.

"Journalism of the first order, moving and informative in equal measure." --San Francisco Chronicle

"A remarkably well-researched and accomplished book." --The New York Times Book Review

"A wrenching, riveting book." --Chicago Tribune

"Haunting." --People

"It would take a heart of stone not to be moved by the oral histories of these women and by the courage and candor with which they express themselves." --The Washington Post

"Compelling, heartrending reading." --Portland Tribune

"An astonishing oral history." --Salon.com

Publisher: Penguin Books

Pub date: 2007-07-01

Length: 368 pages