7pm — Innovation + Leadership event 
8pm — Post-show Reception for Director’s Club begins. This reception is open to Patron-level members and up. Kindly RSVP here.

From the bestselling memoirist, novelist, and host of the hit podcast Family Secrets, comes a memoir about the staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test: an exploration of the urgent ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love. Dani Shapiro will be in conversation with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, bestselling author of The Body Keeps the Score, a book on trauma’s effect on the body. 

In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history—the life she had lived–crumbled beneath her. 

Inheritance is a book about secrets—secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman’s urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. 

About the Moderator: 

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk M.D. is one of the leading experts in trauma and the bestselling author of The Body Keeps the Score. He is the founder of the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is also a professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and director of the National Complex Trauma Treatment Network.