Instant Mom
With her love of family fully on display in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the movie she wrote and starred in, it&#x2019;s no surprise Vardalos had always wanted to be a mother. After 10 agonizing years undergoing fertility treatment, she and her husband looked into adoption, a process with its own ups and downs. Finally, with only 14 hours&#x2019; notice, Vardalos was the mother of a three-year-old girl. The years enduring the well-meaning inquiries of friends, mean-spirited jibes of insensitive women, and probing of Hollywood reporters were over. Now all she had to figure out was how to mother a preschooler with a very well-developed personality and cope with her own early insecurities about the &#x201C;match.&#x201D; Vardalos offers candor, humor, and poignancy in her account of adoption and parenthood as she pokes fun at parenting memoirs but delivers on emotional impact. Readers can feel the tension between desire to share her joy and good fortune and wish to maintain her child&#x2019;s privacy. Vardalos, who has become a spokesperson for adoption, offers helpful information on the process as well as encouragement to prospective adoptive parents. --Vanessa Bush