Finding Mary Smith: A Memoir of Family Secrets, Gray Market Adoption, and the Miracle Reunion with My Mom

Winner of the 2026 Global Book Awards GOLD Medal for Biographical / Memoir

What if, at 52 years old, you discovered that everything you believed about where you came from wasn’t true?

For Al Isaacs, it began with an unexpected phone call that revealed a secret his entire family had kept from him for more than five decades: he was adopted.

With both of his adoptive parents unable to provide answers, Al turned to DNA testing, genealogy, old records, and a growing collection of unlikely clues. What followed was a remarkable search through family secrets and gray market adoption that eventually led him to a half-sister he never knew existed—and to the extraordinary story of his birth mother, Mary Smith, a young folk singer whose journey took her from Michigan to New York City, a national television competition, a recording contract, and the Greenwich Village music scene of the late 1960s and early ’70s.

Part mystery, part family history, and part deeply personal memoir, Finding Mary Smith explores what happens when the story you've believed about yourself suddenly changes—and whether discovering the truth can change who you are.

Told with the humor of a longtime comedian and the vulnerability of a son searching for answers, this is a story of identity, DNA, adoption, family secrets, loss, love, and an improbable reunion more than half a century in the making.

Sometimes the truth arrives decades late.

Sometimes it arrives exactly when it’s supposed to.