🧩 Relative Strangers

This week on Missing Pieces — NPE Life, Don talks with writer Laura Jenkins, whose essay appears in the new anthology Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship, edited by B.K. Jackson.

Laura shares her story of discovering she is an NPE and the emotional journey that followed — the shock, the questions, the search for truth, and the complicated process of making sense of identity when the story you were given turns out not to be the whole story.

Relative Strangers features 28 writers exploring family secrets, DNA discoveries, inheritance, identity, and what it means when a person who was once a complete stranger turns out to be close family.

You can follow Laura on Instagram at @lajenx
Visit Laura’s website at www.laurajenkinswriter.com
You can follow B.K. Jackson at @b.k.jackson

🎁 Don is also hosting a giveaway for copies of Relative Strangers. To enter, go to Instagram and follow the instructions on the giveaway post at @npe_life_podcast.

🎧 Listen to Missing Pieces — NPE Life
Stories of DNA surprises, NPE discoveries, donor conception, adoption, and the people left to make sense of family secrets.

📩 Contact Don: donNPE@icloud.com
📸 Instagram: @npe_life_podcast

⭐ Please follow the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And if Laura’s story moves you, leaving a rating or review really helps other people find the podcast.

🧩 Analog Rick

In 1992, Rick set out to find his birth mother’s family without DNA tests, without Ancestry, without 23andMe, without Facebook, and without the internet as we know it.

All he had were a few pieces of information, some determination, and the willingness to follow a trail the old-fashioned way.

In this episode of Missing Pieces — NPE Life, Rick tells the story of how he found the missing pieces of who he was.

And make sure you listen to the end, when Don shares what happened after the interview — including how he finally uncovered the identity of Rick’s biological father, a man with a criminal past straight out of an old newspaper headline.

🎧 Listen to Missing Pieces — NPE Life
Stories of DNA surprises, NPE discoveries, donor conception, adoption, and the people left to make sense of family secrets.

📩 Contact Don: donNPE@icloud.com
📸 Instagram: @NPE_LIFE_Podcast

⭐ Please follow the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And if Rick’s story moves you, leaving a rating or review really helps other people find the podcast.

Veronica From The Other Side

In this episode of Missing Pieces — NPE Life, Don talks with Veronica, who discovered in middle age that her father had two children outside of his marriage.

For NPEs — Not Parent Expected — adoptees, donor-conceived people, and others who uncover family secrets through DNA, the focus is often on the person making the discovery. But what about the family on the other side? What is it like to get the call that a stranger shares your father’s DNA? What happens when a secret you never asked to keep suddenly lands in your lap?

Veronica shares what it was like to learn that she had siblings she never knew existed, and how her family had to make room for a truth that changed the story they thought they knew.

🧩 Missing Pieces — NPE Life
Stories of DNA surprises, family secrets, and the search for identity.

📸 Instagram: @npe_life_podcast
📧 Email: donNPE@icloud.com