Melissa Fay Greene

I had the pleasure of meeting Melissa Faye Greene at the Austin Jewish Book Fair in November. She was there to sign No Biking in the House Without a Helmet (Sarah Crichton Books, 2011) and to provide the opening address. No Biking is a memoir chronicling how she and her family of six (mom, dad, four kids) adopted five orphans from overseas—one Bulgarian-Romani and four Ethiopian—over a period of eight years.

Gotta love this woman, gotta read her book. Smart, witty, warm—in person and show more in print. Greene is an award-winning journalist best known for her books on the civil rights movement and the African HIV/AIDS pandemic. NYU’s journalism department named Praying for Sheetrock one of the top 100 works of journalism in the 20th Century. But at the lectern, she’s a poet-performer. She belongs on the Chauttauqua lecture circuit of yore, delighting audiences with her wisdom and charm.

For Greene, writing in the first person was both unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Clearly, she overcame those obstacles. But this memoir is no bildungsroman in that it’s not about her. It’s about her family—the decisions they made, the antics they performed, and the travails they passed through. Greene readily acknowledges the depression she slipped into and the seemingly insurmountable challenges presented by children whose starts in life were so tenuous. With the clear-headedness that comes with her profession, she observes her surroundings, arms herself with information, weighs possible outcomes, and soldiers on.

At the lectern, Greene is something of a comedian. Many of the funny stories she shared in Austin came verbatim from the book. There’s Jesse, the first adoptee, taunting Helen, the second, that if she doesn’t remove her underpants when she bathes in the mikveh to be converted, her butt won’t be Jewish. There’s Greene’s biological daughter, Lily, at age two, waving good-bye to a strip of plastic ribbon whipping in the wind at a gas station as Lily imagines this stop was the much anticipated family trip to Disney World and the ribbon, Tinkerbell. There’s Fisseha, the second Ethiopian adoptee, who spears a flying Frisbee with a bicycle safety flag pole and teaches the neighborhood kids to make slingshots and whips from tree bark and plants.

Yet, in the book, Greene’s hilarity is tempered by her encounters with the chilling circumstances from which she plucks these new additions and the baggage that comes with them. Jesse was separated from his parents in infancy and lived the first four years of his life in an institution, making it especially hard for him to learn to play or to feel safe. The other children who lost their parents to AIDS were held and loved when young, but they are old enough to remember and to miss the families and homeland left behind. But as Greene writes, “The power of the human mind to repair itself is a remarkable thing.”

I don’t believe I would have read this memoir if I hadn’t heard Greene speak. Her audience is international adoptive families as well as readers of her previous books who want to know more about this journalist’s life. As a thoroughbred skeptic, I’m not inclined to believe anyone could assume the burden of adopting five challenging children without some hidden—possibly unhealthy—motive. Yet, from what I’ve read and what I’ve seen, I can only conclude that she’s the real thing . . . the genuine article. And the human community is lucky to have her—as journalist, mother, wife, and human being. show less

When Melissa Fay Greene was in her mid-forties and beginning to see the edges of the empty nest on her horizon, she wondered if she could squeeze one more child in before her child-bearing years were officially over. She and her criminal defense attorney husband, Donny, both felt like they weren't quite ready to give up the joys of parenting. As it turns out, while her child-bearing years were, in fact, over, her parenting years had only just begun. After much internet research and some show more freelance writing about the work of international adoption doctors, Melissa traveled to Bulgaria to meet the boy who would be her first adopted son, Jesse. But the couple didn't stop there, when her heart and her writing took her to Africa where she saw the far-reaching effects of the HIV/AIDS crisis leaving unfathomable numbers of both healthy and well children orphaned, Greene knew she and her family could make even more space for children who had no place to go.

No Biking in the House Without a Helmet is jam packed with the trials of trying to create a family from children from around the globe, but it's packed with enough heart and humor that more than make up for the hardships. Greene balances her funniest family anecdotes with her more serious struggles to make her adopted children feel loved and appreciated without letting her biological children fall by the wayside as well as her fierce determination that her adopted children not lose touch with their original countries and cultures even as they live their new lives in the U.S. With a family so large and diverse, Greene often worries that she has traded in a family for just another group home where there's not quite enough love to go around, and not enough unity to constitute a family, but No Biking is proof-positive that, ultimately, those worries are unfounded.

Greene tells her story with honesty and manages to capture the individuality of each of her children and how they come together as a family all without ever succumbing to cheesiness. She captures the joy of a child at being welcomed into a new family but never oversimplifies the challenges of creating a new life for a child that once had a family or spent their entire childhood in an institution. By the end of the book, I was totally captured by this woman and her family who had the courage, determination, and more than enough love to spare to open their hearts and homes to children in need from across the globe and how even though it wasn't always easy, with love and a very good sense of humor they make their decidedly unique family work. show less

Greene tells the true story of a corrupt sheriff and an awakening African American community in McIntosh County, Georgia. What is so surprising is that the incidents occurred not in the 50s or during the traditional civil rights era but later, from the mid- to late-seventies and well into the eighties. The sheriff had such a hold on the community that the blacks who lived there, a majority of the population, accepted things as they were until one man stood up to it. The story is complicated show more and hard to relate in just a few sentences. One of the things I really enjoyed about the book was the attention to detail and description. Greene has done an excellent job of catching the essence of so many small communities in rural Georgia. Most of them are not corrupt, and that is not what I mean - it's the descriptions of the towns, the land, and the people. show less

It may be a cliche to say that you laughed so hard you cried, except that I did while reading this book. Several times. Greene tells the story of how her family created itself with such wonderful humor that you can't help but fall in love with them all.

Of course, a book like this can't be all sunshine and smiles, and Greene doesn't pull her punches when relating stories of family tribulation. Nor does she leave us in any doubt that children around the world face horrifying poverty and hunger show more every day.

If this book has a flaw, it's that it's a little uneven. In the midst of discussing the process of adopting one child, the narrative jumps back to relate an anecdote involving an older child, or Green's own childhood. These leaps never detract from the overall story, but the transitions are sometimes jarring.

Another cliche: this book is both hysterical and heartbreaking. But mostly it is about how family bonds are about love and effort more than blood. show less