Vanishing Acts

About Vanishing Acts

Delia Hopkins has a life she understands. She lives in New Hampshire with her father Andrew, handles search-and-rescue dogs, and is about to have a baby with her longtime boyfriend. Then a man is arrested in Arizona, and the arrest surfaces something that cracks the story Delia has always known about herself. Her father took her from her mother when she was four years old. Her mother is alive. Everything she has been told about her past is wrong.

Published by Simon & Schuster in 2005, Vanishing Acts is told in multiple first-person voices—Delia, her father Andrew, her boyfriend Fitz, and her best friend Eric—which allows Picoult to show how the same event is processed entirely differently by each person involved. Andrew, who took Delia to protect her from an alcoholic mother, is not a monster. His love for his daughter is genuine and total. His judgment about what that love entitled him to do is the question the novel examines.

The book also spends considerable time in an Arizona prison, following Andrew's incarceration after his arrest on parental abduction charges. Picoult's research into prison conditions—including the role of Native American inmates in Maricopa County—adds a dimension to the novel that is far from the primary emotional plot but informs how the justice system the novel moves through actually works.

Memory, Identity, and the Stories We're Given

Delia's central problem is not simply that she was lied to. It is that the lie has shaped everything she knows about herself—her tastes, her habits, her fears, her sense of what is home. Discovering that the foundation of her identity was constructed out of a decision her father made when she was four does not erase the identity; it just makes the scaffolding visible. Who is she, given that? The novel lives in that question.

Her search-and-rescue work is not incidental to the novel's concerns. Finding lost people, she has learned, often means understanding why they don't want to be found. Her father has spent decades being found every day by the daughter who doesn't know she's looking for him.

Why Vanishing Acts Has Been Challenged

Vanishing Acts has been challenged in 2 states and 5 districts tracked in this catalog. Challenges most often cite content related to alcoholism, the prison sequences, and language. The novel's treatment of a father who commits a crime out of love is occasionally cited as well—the absence of a straightforward moral verdict on Andrew is unsatisfying for readers who want fiction to deliver one. That is precisely what Picoult declines to provide.