Surrender, Marylee MacDonald
Surrender, Marylee MacDonald
List: $12.99 | Sale: $9.10
Club: $6.49

Surrender
A memoir of nature, nurture, and love

Author: Marylee MacDonald

Narrator: Kristi Koons

Unabridged: 10 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/16/2020


Synopsis

Her young life changed in an instant. Now she shares her story with the child she gave away.
Adopted at birth, Marylee's parents told her she was a "chosen child." She tried her hardest to make them proud, but her parents' divorce sent her into the comforting arms of a handsome Catholic boy.
Convinced that he was her Romeo and she a modern-day Juliet, she surrendered to passion. Unfortunately, it was 1961. Pregnant girls were sent away, and their babies given up for adoption.
Nature vs. nurture:Which plays a greater role in who we become? The family we were raised in, or the parents we never knew?
In telling her adult son the story of his birth, can the narrator find compassion for her own wounded inner child?
If you like truthful accounts laced with the passion of youth and the wisdom of age, read Marylee MacDonald's funny and poignant memoir about how we grow up, grow old, and learn to accept ourselves.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Provin on February 26, 2024

Marylee McDonald has written an honest, heart wrenching and compassionate memoir. Surrender is a wonderful book written to explain the authors journey through life to her son. Marylee was teenager who went into survival mode when her adoptive parents decide to get a divorce. In 1961, Marylee was dev......more

Goodreads review by Marylee on March 09, 2023

Readers can walk down Memory Lane, back to 1961 and the days before family planning.......more

Goodreads review by Abigail on November 25, 2020

This author has a unique view of adoption, as she's both adopted herself and surrendered a child for adoption as a teen. This book covers the long-term effects of those choices, on her adoptive parents, on her and on the son she gives up. The author also incorporated research on the psychological im......more

Goodreads review by Margaret on November 19, 2020

Marylee Benham and her boyfriend John MacDonald were teenage sweethearts. Both hard-working, brilliant students, they carried an unusual weight of responsibility, Marylee for her older, unwell, divorced mother, and John for helping out in his household of seven siblings. Responsible as they were in t......more

Goodreads review by Lee on February 17, 2021

As a woman who surrendered a child during the sixties, I can't be totally unbiased about Marylee Macdonald's memoir, Surrender. Younger readers might have a hard time believing how shameful and fraught it was to be, like 16-year-old Marylee, an unwed mother in 1962, but I found the memoir riveting a......more