“The Names of My Mothers” by Dianne Sanders Riordan is now available for purchase
“How can I pinpoint the beginning of this journey? Haven’t I always dwelt in the land of journeying? Wondering, always. Discreetly, silently searching every face I see, calculating height and weight. Vigilant, always. Considering the possibility that someone might resemble me—be kin to me. The wondering as much a part of my being as my dark brown eyes and hair.”
– an excerpt from the book
AR Press is honored to publish “The Names of My Mothers” by Dianne Sanders Riordan. The book is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the ARPress website.
This is not a story of regret.
Nor is it in any way a repudiation of my adopted life.
But knowing is a holy thing
And it is in knowing that one comes home.
Dianne Sanders Riordan and her husband, Frank, live in Buffalo, New York, where they resettled after serving twenty years as a Navy family. They are the parents of three daughters and four sons, and grandparents of seventeen.
Dianne received a BA from Rosary Hill College (now Daemen College). A retired family advocate with the Mental Health Association of Erie County, she now volunteers with Justice for Migrant Families. Her poems have been published in “Women of the Vineyard,” Volumes 1 and 2.
The Names of My Mothers is the touching story of the tender and all-too-brief relationship forged late in life between Dianne Riordan (nee Susanne Sanders) and her birth mother.
In 1942, Elizabeth Bynam Sanders was a young woman who left home under false pretenses and traveled to Our Lady of Victory, a home for unwed mothers in upstate New York. Shortly after surrendering her daughter for adoption, she returned to her life in Johnston County, North Carolina. She never married and never had another child of her own.
This powerful and moving memoir speaks of the profound need for connection. It is a story about identity, the hunger we feel for a sense of belonging, and the ineffable significance of blood.
“The Names of My Mothers” by Dianne Sanders Riordan is now available for purchase via ARPress Bookstore: https://authorreputationpress.com/bookstore/the-names-of-my-mothers/.