Perry Dupuis

The (Almost) Christmas Baby Perry Dupuis

The (Almost) Christmas Baby explores the journey of a woman adopted shortly after birth and her search as an adult for her place in the world. Like many adopted people, Perry never felt she quite fitted into the world she found herself in. Her story leads from the pastoral countryside of England where she was raised, to the poverty of the cotton and tobacco fields of the rural South of the United States. Family secrets long buried on both sides of the Atlantic are exposed with her shocking findings.

She explores the struggles that women faced as divorcees, the discrimination against mothers of babies conceived "out of wedlock" and how society's values of the 1950's and 60's labelled these innocent babies as tainted.

Perry travels to America to explore her paternal roots in North Carolina and meets with her birth father's fractured family. Theirs is a story of generational dysfunction and violence born out of poverty and the desire to break free from the past.

The unexpected outcome lays the foundation for reconciliation and healing, not only for Perry but for the others involved in her story, and demonstrates how the birth of an unwanted child in the most unhappy of circumstances can brig about positive changes in the most unimagined ways.