Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets

by Kyo Maclear

WINNER OF THE 2023 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR NONFICTION

For readers of Crying in H Mart and Wintering, an unforgettable memoir about a family secret revealed by a DNA test, the lessons learned in its aftermath, and the indelible power of love.

Three months after Kyo Maclear’s father dies in December 2018, she gets the results of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, unravelling a family mystery piece by piece, and assembling the story of her biological father. Along the way, larger questions what exactly is kinship? And what does it mean to be a family?

Thoughtful in its reflections on race and lineage, unflinching in its insights on grief and loyalty, Unearthing is a captivating and propulsive story of inheritance that goes beyond heredity. 

What gets planted, and what gets buried? What role does storytelling play in unearthing the past and making sense of a life? Can the humble act of tending a garden provide common ground for an inquisitive daughter and her complicated mother? As it seeks to answer these questions, Unearthing bursts with the very love it seeks to understand.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Canada, Biography Memoir, Biography, Autobiography

403 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2023

About the author

Kyo Maclear is an essayist, novelist and children’s author. She was born in London, England and moved to Toronto at the age of four with her British father (a foreign correspondent and documentary filmmaker) and Japanese mother (a painter and art dealer).

Her books have been translated into eighteen languages, published in over twenty-five countries, and garnered nominations from the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Awards, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the National Magazine Awards, among other honours.

Unearthing: a Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets (2023) was a national bestseller and awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her hybrid memoir Birds Art Life (2017) was a #1 National Bestseller and winner of the Trillium Book Award and the Nautilus Book Award for Lyrical Prose. It was named one of the best books of 2017 by The Globe and Mail, CBC, Now Magazine, the National Post, Forbes, the Chicago Review of Books, and Book Riot.

Her work has appeared in Orion Magazine, Brick, Border Crossings, The Millions, LitHub, The Volta, Prefix Photo, Resilience, The Guardian, Lion’s Roar, Azure, The Globe and Mail, and elsewhere. She has been a national arts reviewer for Canadian Art and a monthly arts columnist for Toronto Life.

Kyo holds a doctorate in environmental humanities teaches creative writing with The Humber School for Writers and the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA.

She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, the Haudenosaunee, Métis, and the Huron-Wendat.

Reviews

[Mizuki Giffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes a book feels like it was written purposefully and specifically for you, which feels odd to say about a memoir. This is a deeply personal and intimate story about Kyo Maclear's relationship with her parents after finding out, after his death, that her father isn't actually her biological father. In the following months of upheaval and confusion, Kyo finds comfort in gardening: an act which connects her with her mother, whose past becomes increasingly complicated with these secrets brought to light. The way Kyo articulates her unique and singular experience with universal themes of lineage, truth, storytelling, and forgiveness was so moving. But what really spoke to me was how Kyo Maclear writes about the experience of being half-Japanese. Despite not being fluent in Japanese and feeling the rift this places between her and her mother, despite not growing up in Japan and not being viewed as 'Japanese' enough by other people, she still takes pride and ownership in her culture: it's interlaced throughout the book in each section title, in the romaji lines of text she places without translation, in textual references, and even in the delicacy and lyricism of her writing. I loved everything about this. It wasn't a story that tore your heart and made you want to sob your eyes out, but a series of observations, strung together, with a voice both gentle and mature that guided you to see Kyo's experiences through her eyes, and understand what they taught her, and us, about what it means to be an interconnected, living, rooted being on this earth.

[urooba · Rating 5 out of 5]

the MOST beautiful book i’ve ever read. so so heartfelt and incredibly written. wonderfully poetic and makes you fall in love with the world again & again & again & again. if i were to start annotating this book, i would have to write double the book’s length just to describe all that it made me feel.

seek love everywhere, even in the little things.

ESPECIALLY in the little things.


it exists, i promise.

[Moonkiszt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A DNA sample truly can change your life. Everything you thought you knew rockslides down the pile of stories that make up your own personal history. This is exactly what happened to Kyo Maclear. Unearthing is her reassembling of how it went down.

The story is woven in a free association, poetic style, set in all things earthy, garden-wrapped. Struggles with fact-finding, faced with non-communicative secret-keepers proves hit and miss at best. Still there is enough to square some of the most important questions into a somewhat satisfied category. And for everything else, communing with plants, her supporting family members, what remains in her life helps to reconcile her acceptance of that as . . . .enough.

Touching, emotive and for me the gardening motif was meaningful and deep.

*A sincere thank you to Kyo Maclear, Scribner, and NetGalley for an ARC to read and review independently.*

[Kelly Pramberger · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful book. I was so excited to read a book about the DNA test that gives you a surprise about where you come from. I’ve read several and this was so unique! The author combined her story of finding out about her birth father and half siblings with the relationship she has with her mom. The love of plants and flowers and caring for each other and them are woven throughout. I loved that touch!

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced copy for the purpose of this review. Five stars!

[Harvee Lau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kyo was a difficult character to understand, almost as difficult as her mother, whom she had a unusual relationship with. She tried her best to communicate with her Japanese mother who did not know English well, even while Kyo herself did not know much Japanese. The communication gap was evident and resulted in a remote and distant relationship.

When Kyo discovers the man who raised her is not her biological father, Kyo is unable to get a consistent or clear answer from her mother about this. There are many different stories and assumptions at first, before the truth is slowly and painfully revealed.

I can't understand that a mother would speak to her child in English only when the mother's own knowledge of the language is deficient. That a child would not understand a mother's native tongue, a mother who raised her from birth, needed more explanation.

The first half of the book was tentative, as the author seemed to be at a loss as to how to tell the full story. It was only in the second half that the author seemed more confident and the book written in a more fluid style.

The forays into biology and the natural world, while interesting, prolonged the uncertainty and the distress in the memoir, As a reader, I was also distressed by the story made even more drawn out with the inclusion of a too detailed and prolonged nature study of sorts.

I applaud the author for telling such a personal story. However, it leaves me with more questions about her mother. Kyo seems to concentrate more on the importance of her fathers and their history and importance to her life. Her mother remains a strange and contradictory blur that raises a lot of unanswered questions.

[Lata · Rating 4 out of 5]

A DNA test ends up shaking artist and writer Kyo Maclear's world, calling into question much of the stories she knows about her parents.

Some months after her father's death, Kyo Maclear receives the results of a DNA test, which inform her that the man she thought was her father was not. It's shocking, difficult to process, and sends Maclear on a long search for answers.

Answers from her mother prove initially elusive, and it's not till Maclear uses gardening as a way to find common ground to talk with her about difficult things that she begins to get answers. Maclear also works with a Search Angel to finally locate half-siblings and an identity for her biological father. During this time, Maclear's mother also gets cancer, and Maclear must deal with all this brings up, while also processing all the changes to her understanding of who her mother is as she learns how and why her mother became involved with the man who became her biological father.

The writing is sensitive, heart wrenching, and meditative. Maclear gently unfolds her parents' complicated and difficult relationship, and how her mother's loneliness as a Japanese immigrant in London and desire to make art propelled her to make decisions that would ultimately affect her daughter.

It's also a quiet, highly observant memoir about search for answers, yearning for connection, the power of art, and nurturing a garden. It's lovely, and touching.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Penguin Random House Canada for this ARC in exchange for my review.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started out reading this book and found the writing to be exquisite and so beautiful. I'd stop and re-read a sentence and was so impressed. But it began to be a smorgasboard and I was getting full. I felt like this really could be two books and while I greatly enjoyed the first part of it, it bogs down after that and seems repetitive and overly caught up in emotional baggage. Of course that's just me. Others may appreciate the great details of her feelings and where they took her. And then there's the plant life. Vegetation makes me sneeze and break out in rashes. But I began to get a better sense of gardening and gardens and I gained a bit more of an appreciation for plant life. Come to think of it, this could really be three books: 1) Finding my roots, 2) Dealing with dementia and death of ones' parents, and 3) All about gardens.

Maclear uses the old Japanese calendar to pace her book. It seems to be popular to incorporate this calendar these days into life, writing, etc. But Maclear had the cultural background to understand it and the language to appreciate it. It works well for pacing the reader and giving us manageable chunks to digest.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. You could say that there is something for every reader in it.

[Shervin R · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a good book. Highly recommend if you’re into poetry and plants.

[Romane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kyo Maclear memoir’s reflects on kinship, heritage, and the tangled web of familial ties following the death of the man she always knew as her father. his passing upends everything she thought she knew about her life when she learns that he wasn’t her biological father. what follows is a quest for identity and certainties. beyond this, this memoir is also a stunningly biological, floral, and botanical book. reading it feels like stepping into a greenhouse, surrounded by a vibrant, interconnected organic world. the writing is poetic, meditative, gentle, and utterly captivating, infused with the author’s background in environmental humanities. the story unfolds through the lens of “small seasons,” or “sekki” in japanese tradition, with each chapter capturing the slow passage of time, the cycle of life, and the rhythms of renewal. i warmly recommend this book, even if only for the exquisite writing and the vivid, organic world that blossoms through its pages and sketches.

[Bbecca_marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets was written beautifully and artfully. I really enjoy memoirs when written well and this one was crafted wonderfully. Kyo's journey in life, love, and relationships felt tangible and relatable but at the same time unique. The expectations of others, the life we choose to live, and the life we didn't choose to have, were all wrapped up in a gift for us to read and enjoy. If you enjoy memoirs that'll absolutely just tug at your heartstrings, pick this one up. Out now!

Thank you, Scribner, for this beautiful gift and giving me the chance to read and review it honestly.

Happy reading!

[Mai H.]

Memoir March TBR

Non-fiction November TBR

📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner

[Sarah Kay · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was a disaster on multiple fronts:
Firstly, the author utterly fails to deliver on the premise outlined in the synopsis, instead veering off into irrelevant and random topics like the weather, gardening, thanking the birds and trees, Zionism and turning what should have been a memoir into a disjointed mess.

Her obsession with sounding eloquent on paper strips the book of any real substance, often rendering it nonsensical and pointless. Did she do what Joey Tribbiani did and used a thesaurus to write the whole book?
 
This is hands down the worst memoir I’ve ever encountered; it reads more like a scatterbrained thought journal than a proper book.
 

[Janet Hutchinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I struggled with this one. It is beautifully written, but the story of loss and memory, of loss of memory was difficult to engage with (for me). The interjecting of plants and gardens within the book sometimes felt completely right - and in other spots, not right at all. I’m giving this 4 stars for the writing - but it's a complicated read. But goes with the complicated lives revealed here.

[Jennifer]

Memoirs are difficult to rate because it’s someone’s personal story. This is beautifully written but just didn’t keep my attention. I’m sure a lot of people will appreciate the author’s beautiful way of telling her story.

[Bronwyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another book for work book club! This book is beautifully written but I think I just need to take a break from memoirs because I had a hard time engaging with this book

[Natalie Park · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Thank you to Net Galley and Scribner for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. The book begins when the the author's father has passed away from dementia and she decides to take a DNA test to learn more about her ancestry. When her results come back, she realized that her father was not her biological father. She contemplates what to do and asks her mother about this. She then goes on a journey of unearthing the secrets both her father and mother kept. The story is told in a beautiful manner, interweaving the role of nature in our lives - in a philosophical way to every day occurrences - another way the author unearths. As her mother was Japanese and part of the author's history, she titles the chapters based on the Japanese idea and words used for the different seasons of the year. I very much enjoyed the story and writing for most of the book but the storytelling seemed to lose it's way or focus for the last third. I didn't really understand where the author was going or why she was delving into certain topics.

[Robyn]

Birds Art Life is one of my all time favourite memoirs, so I was really really excited for this. Unfortunately it just felt too long once I got about halfway through and I completely lost interest in picking it up. Went overdue at the library and I just didn't have it in me to finish. Maybe I'll give it another go some other time.

[Chelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to give this 4.5 stars! Losing half a star only because I wish the book had a couple PHOTOS! Of the people, the scenes and/or plants, maybe? I think a timeline may be helpful—basically a visual somewhere could’ve helped to ground (no pun intended) the reader between the past, present, and plant discussions in the book.

I listened to the audiobook read by the author, fantastic voice, recommended experience. There is a lot going on in this book, the storytelling is beautiful, the characters are described so richly I feel as though I know them in my life now, and the book is truly packed with botanical and cultural knowledge. I loved this read!

[sunnyafternoon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this one really hard to rate because I do think the bones of the story are very interesting and there were sections where I was literally in tears, but there were also large chunks that I found meandering and overwrought with plant metaphors. Like, I know the whole schtick with this book is the plants and stuff, but I found some of the connections a bit of a reach and I preferred the sections where it was just the author telling us her story without trying to relate it to gardens or whatever.

[Terra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crying in H Mart but make it Canadian. So, so good! So beautifully written and so thoughtful.

[Brianna Miller]

***PLEASE NOTE THAT MY STAR RATING DOESN'T NECESSARILY REFLECT WHAT YOU WILL READ IN THIS REVIEW. SINCE A MEMOIR IS SOMEONE'S REAL STORY, I WILL ALWAYS GIVE MEMOIRS 5 STARS, BECAUSE I FEEL IT'S NOT MY PLACE TO JUDGE OR "RATE" THEIR STORY.***

The synopsis of this memoir completely intrigued me and I looked forward to following along the author's journey of unearthing the secrets from her past and solving the mystery of her DNA. While the book did technically do that, I'm not sure the way it was presented worked for me.

The writing was lyrical and you can tell the author is a strong and gifted writer. However, I picked up a book that I thought was going to be a faster-paced family mystery, and I was interested to see what the author did with the information she learned.

What it ended up being was a whole lot of focus on two things: plants and the author's mother. For obvious reasons, I understand why her mother was central to the story. But a lot of the focus was on her mother in the present day, and it became overly repetitive at times, not really going anywhere. I understand the author's anguish and frustration, but it just felt like there were many instances where the author visited her mother and got absolutely no new information, so it seemed strange to repeatedly give the readers very detailed descriptions of these meetings.

As far as the plants go, I do understand how plants played a role in the author's life, but I don't know that it made sense for plants to have such a starring role in this book. It was....a lot. I am not someone that ever skims when I read - I read every word, every sentence, every page. But I found myself skimming through parts of this book more than once, and it was always when it went deep into the plant topics. The plants had a lot to do with the relationship between the author and her mother, but nothing to do with the mystery of the author's DNA. I can understand how plants acted as a kind of therapy to get the author through many of the emotions of learning her history, but that could've been acknowledged in a much more concise way.

I know it's funny to say that the book was written well while I also saying I was so bored by some parts that I just skimmed over them, but that really is the case with this book. The author writes really well. But it almost felt as if this either should've been two different books, or that the book is being marketed incorrectly. I think the synopsis should be reworked in such a way that people understand there is a very heavy focus on plants in this book, and that would set their expectations more accurately before they begin reading.

[Paris Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book is relatively good and I also think it’s too long. Towards the end it starts to feel like talking to the person who is just endlessly philoshiphying about this that and the third. A person that’s always saying something like “and as i pulled up to the gas station, i realized that I too, needed to replace what was nearing empty inside my heart with something natural that has been refined to serve a greater purose”. Like PLEASE! You’re doing that for 373 PAGES?! I cannot! I was getting tired of all the poetic/metaphoric/deep/borderline philosophical exploration like it was entirely too much for me to be reading that for that long

[Gail · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Kyo Maclear’s memoir, we are given a glimpse into an intimate part of her life. To start with, after the death of her father, she discovers that he was her father only by proximity, that in actuality she had another biological father, one she had never met. In a lesser writer’s hands, this could have been a simple book discussing how her mother didn’t tell her the truth, but with Kyo her interests in her mother’s love of gardens, her mother’s life and the uncovering of this new father is delivered like an archeologist piecing together so many overlaying facts.

“Her parents lived a lie, but the lie keeps them together, even when their relationship was over, their devotion was bigger and stood the test of time.” Kyo works with great sensitivity not only about her parents and the new father but talks openly about race, religion and cultural difference, and gets us to see issues from many sides. She is eager to have us learn that even though this is painful, the uncovering of all this information is important to find a part of herself she needs to find.

All in the all the book takes us through the shifting lives of her parents and Kyo gives us insight into her perspective on aging and dying. It is deeply felt and witnessed. Her writing is beautiful and should be cherished. Enjoy the read, and thank you NetGalley

[kimberly · Rating 3 out of 5]

“What is grief, if not the act of persisting and reconstituting oneself?”
Ugh, I love a memoir that is full of grief. Grief is what makes us all so human and connected, in my eyes, and it is palpable in this book. This is a deeply intimate memoir about Maclear’s relationship with her parents and a hunt for the truth after a DNA test reveals that the man she knew as her father her whole life, isn’t actually her biological father.
Her relationship with her mother feels stunted —her mother is keeping secrets, doesn’t understand Kyo’s “stories”, and they can’t connect through her mother’s primary language, Japanese— so in order to understand her mother better, Maclear turns to her mother’s love of gardening (of which she knows nothing about herself). I enjoyed a look in to the nuances of their mother-daughter relationship and how Maclear weaves her Japanese roots and lineage in to the story.
At times, the writing style seemed too metaphorical and cryptic which would jolt me out of my reading flow and it took me some time to get connected again. In the end, I still found it captivating, beautiful, and worth the read.
Thank you to NetGalley for my digital copy.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will actually rate this 3.5 stars...it would have been 4 stars if I was rating only the first half of this book. It's beautifully written, but it's also a book that flirts with poetic language and construction...which is simply not my thing at all. I also found that it starts to ramble and stretch out the story...and I'm a man who prefers concise storytelling. It's not really the kind of book I usually gravitate towards...but I'll be damned if it didn't make its best attempt to suck me in.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a beautifully written memoir in which Maclear dove deep into her family roots, as well as to contend with unearthed family secrets. Maclear's story began with a DNA test that revealed that her father was not biologically related to her, which results in an ongoing question throughout this memoir: What does "family" mean? The memoir was an exploration of other themes as well, particularly love and identity, and how the complexities of kinship impacted them.

I think there were a lot of great themes that were clearly meant to connect, but I found that the delivery to be a little scattered, as Maclear went from one idea or memory to the next. Furthermore, I admit that I found the references and metaphors related to nature felt a little forced at times. (That being said, the times they did work, they were really poignant.)

I'm also still trying to gather my thoughts on how Maclear approached her biracial identity and how this tied to her relationship with her Japanese mother. What I can say is that their relationship was clearly complex, which, in turn, complicated the way Maclear chose to write about it.

There's a lot to think about in this memoir; perhaps you could even argue that there might be too much. However, if you're hoping to find something introspective in tone and lyrically written, this memoir might be for you.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are not enough stars ⭐️ ⭐️, so here’s two more. Such beautiful writing. Kyo Maclear explores her provenance , with intensity and drive, once she discovers there is a secret father. This book traces that quest and ponders the meaning of family, of gardens, and of the coincidence of both, and so much more. It also explores the meaning of love, and identity as her parent’s memories disappear in their respective dimensias. Throughout the book she explores her topics with clarity and concentration. Highly recommend.

[Lesley Holtby]

How can you rate a memoir? While the short, anecdotal style writing can be difficult to track, it is very reminiscent of how people tell you about their lives and how we remember our own lives. Maclear is also talented at portraying how relationships and our role in relationships change due to time and experience.

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

A woman takes a DNA test and discovers that her father isn’t her biological father. She becomes obsessed with finding out more about her biological family. Her mother slowly tells her secrets but I got annoyed by both of them. Her mother obviously wanted privacy and her daughter couldn’t stop probing the past.

[Rhonda Lomazow · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written book a story of family of a dna test a shocking result for the author the man she thought was her dad was not her birth father. As she starts her search for her real birth dad so much is revealed.This reads like a detective story a mystery to be answered.Mixed in with the search is the authors discovery of her love for plants that she inherited from her mom.This is a multi layered story full of heart wrenching moments and lyrical writing.#netgalley #scribner