From My Meteorite, which was published last month by Penguin Books. Dodge is a sculptor and video artist.

I always knew I was adopted, and since I was born in San Francisco in 1966 (this I did know) and since my imagination was admittedly psychedelic, I had more than toyed with the idea that my conception had occurred in Golden Gate Park during a summer of love and had been abetted by an LSD-addled haze and multiple orgasms.

At thirteen, I had written a hideously long, hideously depressing research paper on the psychological stresses that attend adoption. The primary…