Set in 2009, The Making of Us follows three adults who were conceived anonymously via sperm donation in the UK and find each other through a donor sibling registry. Lydia, a wealthy self-made millionaire living alone in London who carries emotional scars from a traumatic childhood; Dean, a confused 21-year-old single father struggling after his girlfriend’s death; and Robyn, an eighteen-year-old med student who is concerned that her boyfriend might be her biological sibling since they look remarkably alike. Running parallel is the story of Daniel, their sperm donor, dying of cancer at 53 in a hospice in Bury St Edmunds, whose friend Maggie registers his information, hoping his donor-conceived children might find him before it’s too late.
DCP Stories Collection
Review
What This Work Does Well
- Presents three distinct disclosure situations: early disclosure with parental support, disclosure by a solo mother at 18, and late disclosure by a relative.
- Each donor conceived character grapples with themes that recur authentically in DCP spaces: identity, belonging, genetic connection, feeling different without knowing why.
What Bothers Us
- Written by a non-donor-conceived author; there are moments where the DCPs’ interior lives feel observed from the outside rather than inhabited from within.
- Robyn’s framing as confident and settled, in contrast to the more troubled Lydia and Dean, risks implying that early disclosure produces well-adjusted DCPs while other disclosure situations produce damaged ones.
- Every DCP’s arc is organized around a father figure — Dean’s absence of one, Lydia’s emotionally unavailable one, Robyn’s beloved one — reinforcing a traditional ideology in which fathers are central to healthy development.
- The plot concentrates meaning on the donor sibling registry as the primary site of belonging, subtly suggesting that genetic connection is where real family lives.
