My story starts with a typical date question: where do your parents live?

My mother lives in Queens. My father lives in Cape Cod with his second wife, where they run a bed and breakfast.

This is one of those veiled statements that feels like a lie because it isn’t the whole truth. It’s like I’m sixteen again and telling my parents, “I was just out.”

The truth is my father in Cape Cod is not my biological parent, and I didn’t find out until I was twenty-four that I had been conceived using donor sperm. The man I knew as my father was infertile. Artificial insemination was the solution.

“My parents are divorced, too,” my last date, let’s call her P, says. P also has a lukewarm relationship with her father. They’ve gone months without talking. We’re eating Thai food.

I want to relate. The only problem is that I stopped seeing myself as a typical child of divorce the moment my mother uttered the words “your father isn’t really your father.” She’d said it just like that, as though she’d had a fling with the mailman.

“My situation’s a little more complicated,” I say to P.

I confess that part of me says this because the story of my conception is a good one, full of pathos and humor. I’ve told it onstage at The Moth, have no qualms about sharing, and am happy to perform. Besides, elements of performance are essential to dating. To a degree, you talk to be heard and impress. You want to be liked. You want your audience to go home and tell their friends that they just have to meet this guy. He’s funny and great and interesting. Buy tickets.

I tell P the safe and tidy narrative of how I found out about my conception—the trip to Florida to visit my sister, the tense hotel room after our mother told us, the Tampa strip-mall bar I went to afterward with hundreds of beers on tap (thank god), and the Disney World cineplex we hid in the next day, watching The Bourne Ultimatum, a film, I realized soon after the opening credits, about a man whose origins, like mine, were shrouded in mystery. I tell her how I wish I could kick ass like Jason Bourne.

Elite fighting skills would’ve really made the whole thing worthwhile.

I don’t mention how at the time my father and I had not been speaking for four years. I don’t mention how unsettling it is to discover that a secret about your own life had been kept from you for twenty-four years. Instead, I talk about Disney World.

It’s really the worst place in the world to go when confronted with your own artificial origins. So fake and plastic.

But I leave out how I worried through my early twenties that I would become my father, a man I held in physical and intellectual contempt for reasons I thought were good at the time. I’m careful to draw inside the lines, to tell least threatening version of the story possible. No mess. P barely knows me. She has red hair. I like red hair. She’s funny and smart and I don’t want to scare her with the full scope of my uncertainty and confusion, how I really have no idea, even five years later, what all this means.

“That’s nuts,” she says.

I nod, sip my drink. It is nuts. The events surrounding my conception are strange. But that’s not the only reason I share them. I’m not just trying to awe P. Weaving the pain, shock, and confusion into an entertaining story is liberating. Telling it reminds me that, slowly, I’ve made progress in regards to my father. I’ve grown up a little.

Prior to finding out about my conception, my father and I had this weird, shameful relationship. We’d stopped talking soon after my parents divorced, and I had only the flimsiest of explanations for the silence. “We don’t get along,” I told people, when necessary. Mostly, though, I avoided talking about him, especially with women. My long-term girlfriend at the time thought the circumstances, and my hesitancy to speak on them, were a bad sign. When we broke up after three years—one year after the trip to Florida—she cited my non-relationship with my father as one of the reasons I didn’t know how to act like a man.

This may or may not be true. Certainly, I lacked a strong male role model as a teenager. Certainly, I did dumb, boyish crap in my early twenties. But so do a lot of young men with present and active fathers. True or not, I was in no position to argue. My relationship with my father was a blemish. He was a shadow figure, a pariah I couldn’t charge with any easily definable crime. For a long time, whenever I sought to explain the relationship to others I could only summarize—we don’t get along. My narrative lacked details.

Now, I have my story. Now, I can be profuse with words.

“That’s seriously nuts,” P says again, after I tell her how, coincidentally, three months after the trip to Florida, my father independently sent a letter to my apartment in Brooklyn revealing the exact same secret, as though he and my mother had some psychic connection despite not sharing a single word since their separation.

I’m starting to like P more. It’s not just her blue eyes and red hair. It’s how she listens, how she responds, fully engaged, laughing. She likes the story. I feel validated. I begin to think that maybe, just maybe, this might be someone with whom, at some later date, I can actually talk. Not the talk we’re having over Massaman Curry, this conversation of performance, but the kind of talk you often only have with yourself, an existential dialogue for two. I hadn’t been speaking to this man, my father, because I thought I’d hated him. I’d been actively trying to be nothing like him, and it turned out I barely knew him, or that I only knew the surface of him. He’d been hiding something, an experience I knew, intuitively as a fellow man, had to be difficult to go through. And if I didn’t understand the man I had worked so hard to not be, then what, really, did I know about myself?

This is the real intimacy beneath the story I tell P, the yet unanswered question that I’m terrified to let anyone know lest they go running in the opposite direction. It’s not the story that’s nuts. It’s him. I imagine the man who raised me, my father, who I now maintain a long-distance email correspondence with, knows what it’s like to keep your insecurities buried. He did it for twenty-four years.

I’m often asked if I’ve taken steps to find my biological father. This seems, to new people I meet, the natural direction for my story to take. Kid with evil parent figure finds out that he is in fact a wizard/Jedi/secret agent. Like Harry Potter. Like Luke Skywalker. Like Jason Bourne. We’re all familiar with these orphan characters, and the mythic idea that the self we know is not our self at all, maybe, but something less refined and complete, something less powerful.

P asks. Of course she asks.

“Not really,” I say. Suddenly, I’m tight-lipped. I don’t want to talk about this.

I have no story.

Shortly after I found out about my conception, I had my mother contact the fertility clinic to ask about my records. I didn’t even do it myself. They told her the paperwork had been lost in a fire—I kid you not—and I never followed up on my own. This is what I tell P. I emphasize the ridiculousness of the fire, how it’s so conspiratorial, like a summer movie.

“Do you believe that?” she asks.

“No,” I say.

What I don’t say is that sometimes I think of what it would be like to show up in the drab clinic waiting room, to patiently read a magazine until I’m called to the plexi-glass window, where I politely inform the nurse that my name is Adam Lefton and in May of 1983, with the assistance of reproductive technologies provided by your clinic, I was brought into this world.

Can you see the look of uncomfortable shock on her face?

Can you imagine what a great story that would be?