Searching for Zinnias

At twenty-eight, adoptee Michael Huffman went blind on a train bound for Hamburg — days before starting his first job in corporate America. The doctors needed his family's medical history, but in the era of closed adoptions, Michael didn't have any. What began as a practical search for medical records became something far larger: a journey into biological roots, sexual identity, and the haunting question of where — and to whom — a person truly belongs.

With humor, candor, and a storyteller's eye for the strange symmetries life arranges, Huffman traces his path from a Catholic infant home in Cincinnati to corporate corridors in Houston, from a biological reunion in Ohio to the zinnia gardens of an Austrian village his ancestors fled a century before. Searching for Zinnias is a memoir that reads like a novel — honest about the loneliness of not fitting in, and quietly luminous about what happens when you finally do.