“My mother and I
fought like cat and dog. One day she screamed at me. ‘You’re not my son. You’re trash picked up in the gutter.’ I told her I knew I was adopted. That made her angrier. ‘Who told you?’ No one, I said. I just knew.”
– Errol Uys,
talking to his friend Jim (James Michener) in 1979.
Michener, too, was adopted.
“Jim told me about a member of the Michener clan, who started sending him letters after he began to win recognition. Jim wasn’t a real Michener, the anonymous writer said, but a bastard and a disgrace unfit to bear the name. Year after year, the letters kept coming, their poison more and more vitriolic. Every advance Jim made, there’d be a missive filled with rage and vituperation.”
“‘I’ve not the slightest idea who he is.’ Jim had a notion that the writer was a man. Where were the letters from? I asked. Philadelphia, but that meant little to Jim. One thing that his detractor wrote rang true for him: ‘Just who the hell do you think you are, trying to be better than you are?'”
“‘He got that right,’ Jim said. ‘I’ve always tried to be better than I was.’”