He said it made things clearer. He was right that it did. The clarity was not, in the end, a correction of the love and care he had received. It was an addition to his understanding of where that love and care had come from, and under what pressures and circumstances it had taken the specific shape it did.
From a shore town in New Jersey, in a household organized around a secret, a person was made. He spent thirty-seven years not knowing one of the most basic facts about his origins. He spent the decades after finding out in 1974 continuing to be the person that household had produced.
That is not a tragedy. It is not quite a triumph either. It is what it is: a family, complicated in ways that families often are, maintaining a kind of coherence under pressure for longer than most complications last, and then releasing its held information into the life of the person who had the most to gain and the most to lose from knowing it.
He knew it at thirty-seven. He lived with it for the rest of his life. And what he said about it, across many interviews and many years, remained consistent: dramatic, clarifying, and ultimately received with something that looks, from the outside, like acceptance.
Whether acceptance is the right word is something only he can say. He has chosen that word, more or less. He has chosen it in a variety of formulations across many years and many contexts, and a person’s consistent account of his own experience, whatever the limits of self-knowledge, is the closest approximation to truth that this kind of story permits.