On the Narcissism of Parenting: Adoption, Reality-Testing and The Limits of Imagination in Patrick Flanery’s The Ginger Child and Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child

Via analysis of two literary texts, this article explores the tensions between the fantasy-oriented activity of imagining family life, and the modes of reality-testing encountered in processes of adoption. First, I offer a sustained and close reading of Patrick Flanery's memoir of a failed adoption, The Ginger Child: On Family, Loss and Adoption. This text offers itself as a case study of sorts, a candid and challenging account of the difficulties of navigating the British adoption system as a queer, immigrant man. Second, to supplement my reading of Flanery's text, and to approach the sites of imaginative life that are foreclosed by the memoir genre, I turn to Doris Lessing's novella The Fifth Child. As a twentieth-century gothic tale, Lessing's story dramatizes the impossible "choices" that family-making entails and explores the fantasies and imaginary horrors of an unknowable otherness within the vaunted site of the family.