The Secret

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“Of course, I’ve always had a secret. Have I always known it? I suppose I have in a way-in the way that children know such things. That is to say, I knew and didn’t know. But could I have been called a child, was I a real, an authentic child?

I had no doubt I was, of course. This perhaps proves the point. You are what you think you are, aren’t you?”

This is the beginning of the book: “The Secret” which was written by Eva Hoffman. The story is set in the future and is about a young girl called Iris who was cloned by her mother Elisabeth. But let’s start at the beginning:

The Skyline of Chicago

Iris and her mother live in a small town not far from Chicago in a nice wooden house. Her mother is always there for Iris and gives her everything she wants and much more than she needs. She is totally focused on Iris and loves her half to death. And Iris loves her too, her mother has always been her everything, a warm place where she can run to. At this time Iris feels the strong bond that connects her to her mother, she begins to know that between her and her mother there is something different, something more than just the love between mother and child. Iris has a nice childhood even though she has nearly no contact with other children because her mother doesn’t want it.

When Iris is about six, she overhears a conversation between her aunt Janey and her mother and understands that there’s something monstrous connected with her birth. The poor child doesn’t understand it, she can only see the weird looks everyone gives her when they are looking at her. Six years later a man called Steve comes into her mother’s life and so also into Iris’s. She loves and adores this man like a father and she is really happy that he’s here. In her adolescence Iris becomes more and more like her mother. She looks like her, and makes the same gestures, has the same voice. At the beginning this is fun for both, but then, it gets on Iris’s nerves because she thinks she’s not a person on her own. Steve wants to know the secret of Iris. But Liz won’t tell; they fall out and split up. Iris is very sad after this and she thinks her mother has taken Steven away from her. She wants to know the secret but her mother says she will not tell it before her 18^th birthday. Because of this Iris begins to investigate, to look for information about her past. And then, when she’s 17, she finds her birth certificate, where’s it says that she was cloned in Manhattan.

Iris’s world breaks down after this, she has a big identity crises. All the words she says, all the gestures she makes, even her thoughts: Are they really hers, is she an authentic person of her own or only the blueprint of her mother? When she tells her mother, Liz can’t understand her, she says that she hasn’t got a choice and that Iris should be glad that she’s such a beautiful person and that she’s still her daughter and nothing has changed.

But that isn’t true; for Iris all has become different her mother is like a sister, a sort of twin for her.

The flight to New York

That’s why she runs away and begins to search the past of her mother, of herself.

The difficult way to find her own identity, to understand that genes aren’t everything and that she’s not Iris, the copy of her mother but Iris, a unique, authentic woman, is a big adventure. It leads her to New York and Florida and back to the sources where she comes from, to her grandparents, to her aunt and to a lot

of other interesting, nice and terrible people.

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