Lynne Hugo Reveals Complexities of Adoption in 'Mothers of Fate'

In Mothers of Fate, award-winning author, Lynne Hugo, writes a poignant family drama centered around the intricacies of adoption. Set in Pittsburgh, her novel follows a middle-aged, disabled woman named Deana Wilkes who is searching for the son she gave up 30 years ago in a closed adoption. In the process, she reaches out to an attorney named Monica Connell who is willing to take on the case, but is discouraged by her partner, Angela, who herself was adopted and believes closed adoptions should remain private unless the adoptee seeks out the birth parents. As for why Hugo decided to write a book based on this topic, she explained, “All of my fiction grows out of some social concern, some social issue about which I’m passionate… in this novel, the… social phenomenon is adoption and particularly in this case, closed adoption, which means that there’s no knowledge on the part of the birth parent or parents and the adoptive family or the adopted child of each other’s identity beyond… the intermediary… effective in the 90’s, open adoption became quite common and I think that is probably the prevailing mode now for adoption, but people who are adults now who were adopted… were more often adopted in a closed adoption situation, and so I wanted to look at that and what that is like for the birth parents, and for the adoptee, and for the adoptive parents.”

In regards to her writing process, Hugo said that every so often, she gets story ideas from the news and then uses that to center her plot. “…the one I’m working on right now is on medical ethics and that comes straight out of the newspaper… so then you construct a scenario and then you create… I construct a story arc with an opening, rising action, climax, falling action… I do it as almost as if it’s a theater piece, then I divide it into chapters…” She also prefers not to write endings that are always happy or pleasant. “…life is just not, I write realistic fiction, and there’s never, ‘ok, that’s the end and things didn’t change after this, and it was all happy.’ I wish it were… but it’s not… I never leave a reader without real hope. I never do a hopeless ending, but I never tie up everything so you know exactly what’s going to happen and exactly the whole future.”