Carol Caloro, memoirist, on abusive childhood and a father's love

“Love is not made of DNA,” Carol Caloro writes in her memoir, “My Father’s Daughter.” She speaks with reverence of her kind and loving father and of the difficulties of living with an emotionally abusive mother. Caloro often served as a stand-in mother for her five younger siblings. Her book has many Norman Rockwell-like moments of growing up just after World War II in a small town on the Hudson River. But it ends with a bang. In her 70s, while doing research through Ancestry.com, Caloro discovered the man who loved and raised her, since deceased, was not her biological father. She started writing as a way to deal with that discovery. “He chose to make me his daughter,” she writes, ending her book, “Dad, I so wish you were here. I desperately need to hug you.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.