TAKEN AT BIRTH

Jane Blasio was 6 years old the day she learned she was adopted. She and her older sister Michelle, 11, had been taunted on the playground of their Akron school by classmates who called them “black-market babies”, adding, “you were both bought”. When Michelle told their parents, the girls’ dad, James, sat them down and said, “We have something to tell you …” Their mother, Joan, continued: “You two were adopted. Do you know what that means?” Blasio admits she had “no clue” what her parents were talking about. “Michelle was crying,” she says, “and I just wanted to escape to play in the backyard.”

Yet what she learned that day – and what remained unsaid –, which began airing in 2019. Now, in a new memoir of the same name, Blasio, 56, takes a deeper look at her incredible life. “Some days,” she says, “I just sit and think, ‘How could all of this have happened?’”