Lily Wood is forty-three years old but considers April 9, 2019, to be her “rebirth day.” That was the date she received her results from Ancestry, the direct-to-consumer DNA-testing company. A self-described biohacker, Wood had been curious to see whether she had a genetic predisposition to diseases like Alzheimer’s. “I wanted to get ahead of things,” she told me.
It was actually her second time testing. The first time, Wood had used 23andMe, but the results had seemed off to her. “The ethnicity was wrong,” she said, before correcting herself. “I thought it was wrong.” Her heritage, as she’d always understood it, was French on her father’s side and Norwegian on her mother’s. And yet the 23andMe customers who had come up as genetically close matches had Italian names. Wood, who lives in Minneapolis, where she grew up, called her sister, who speculated that a strand of hair belonging to a lab technician had gotten into the vial. Her sister advised her to try Ancestry. When the new results came in, Wood learned that there was a man in the company’s database with whom she shared fourteen hundred centimorgans, a measure of genetic overlap that typically denotes a half sibling. But this man was a stranger to her—and the site said that he had Sicilian ancestry.
Wood drove to her mother’s house, a few miles away. When she arrived, her mother, Vicki, was sitting at the kitchen table with her husband, Wood’s stepfather. At the mention of the close match’s surname, Vicki’s face turned bright red. She replied that it was the name of her old boss at FedEx. Wood was nonplussed. “I was, like, ‘What are you saying right now? Are you . . . ? What?’ ” she recalled. Wood’s stepfather looked at his wife and said, “You never thought this was going to come back and bite you, did you?” Vicki then filled in a few details. She had gotten pregnant after sleeping with a higher-up on a business trip in Memphis while married to her first husband, Wood’s presumed father.
The next week was emotionally confusing for Wood. Money had been tight when she was growing up; the man she now calls her “birth-certificate father” had driven a cab, and she’d swept the floors at a local private school in exchange for tuition. Suddenly, here she was, Googling her biological father, a longtime executive at the shipping company, and finding pictures of what appeared to be him and his children riding horses at their ranch in Wyoming. She felt like her world was “shattering,” she told me, but no one around her registered the news that way. She remembered being asked, in the family group chat, what side dish she was bringing for Easter dinner. “We’re a sweep-it-under-the-rug sort of family,” she said. But, as Wood saw it, this wasn’t exactly her family anymore. She confronted her mother, telling her that she did not seem very remorseful. Her sister thought their mother might interpret this as sex-shaming. Wood protested. “I don’t care who she slept with or if the marriage was closed, open, whatever,” she said. “This isn’t about sex. This is about the lie.”
Wood tracked down her biological father and introduced herself. His initial response was encouraging. He said that he remembered her mother. “We will help bring clarity to this,” he assured her, and told her he’d be in touch soon. A week later, she heard from him again, but the tone had shifted. By then, she had reached out to the man Ancestry had indicated was a half sibling. Her biological father chastised her. “His words were like ‘We don’t do shock and awe in my family’—as if I’m this, like, Jerry Springer–Maury Povich person.”
But Wood did ultimately get into the paternity-surprise media business. Six weeks after her rebirth day, she purchased a mike and, using her living room as a studio, launched a podcast devoted to interviews with people who, like her, had found out through commercial DNA testing that they had been misinformed about their biological parentage. Wood named her podcast “NPE Stories.” The term N.P.E. is often credited to a 2000 study conducted by a pair of geneticists at Oxford who examined whether male Britons with the last name Sykes could be traced to a single shared ancestor through their Y chromosomes. But they kept coming across men named Sykes who didn’t even share their father’s Y chromosome. They called these subjects, diplomatically, “non-paternity events.” In 2017, the acronym became a more entrenched online community when a woman named Catherine St Clair created a Facebook group, eventually called N.P.E. Fellowship, for people who had discovered misattributed parentage through commercial DNA tests. She rebranded N.P.E. to stand for the less technical “not parent expected,” and welcomed late-discovery adoptees (L.D.A.s) and donor-conceived persons (D.C.P.s) to join the family fray.
When Wood started her show, there was already a podcast of N.P.E. tell-alls called “CutOff Genes.” Soon came others: “Everything’s Relative,” “Family Twist,” “Sex, Lies & the Truth.” Before long, anyone with a Spotify account could listen to hundreds of hours of adults trying to make sense of their parents’ sex lives. (Episodes about people who found out that their parents had been swingers in the seventies practically formed their own subgenre.) A man named Jonathon told the hosts of “Sex, Lies & the Truth” that, after being contacted by a daughter he never knew he had, he was upset with her mother at first, but then he reflected that thirty years earlier he had been a “weed-smoking hippie” while she had also been involved with a man training to be an engineer. “In that race, I was Seabiscuit,” he said. Not all episodes are so convivial. Many N.P.E.s look back on their childhoods and—cataloguing every slight, every time they felt different—wonder, Was that why?
Paternity has historically been tricky to pin down. “Mommy’s baby, daddy’s maybe,” as the saying goes. But now the milkman’s kid can buy a DNA test from Target. (Occasionally, people learn that their mother used an egg donor, but paternity surprises are more common.) Since the first commercial DNA test débuted, in 2000, the market has exploded. A 2025 YouGov poll found that one in five Americans has taken a direct-to-consumer DNA test. A few years ago, a research team at Baylor College of Medicine surveyed more than twenty-three thousand customers of these kits and learned that three per cent of them had discovered that a person whom they’d believed to be their biological parent wasn’t. (That number is in line with a 2005 study from a university in Liverpool which found a 3.7-per-cent median rate of misattributed paternity in the general population.) If the ratio holds, that means around two million Americans who have taken one of these tests are N.P.E.s.
A cottage industry has sprung up to service them. There are therapists who specialize in treating N.P.E.s, and “DNA detectives” who can track down relatives who haven’t taken tests by triangulating the results of those who have. There are coaches who guide parents in breaking the news about their child’s origins. Brianne Kirkpatrick Williams, of Watershed DNA, is a genetic counsellor who advertises on her website that she spent years delivering bad news to expectant parents, which makes her uniquely qualified to aid clients who want to inform their grown children that they were donor-conceived, say, or to let their spouses know that they were “contacted by a previously unknown biological child.” She charges eight hundred and ninety-nine dollars for a four-session “Prepare to Share” package.
I became interested in doing a story on N.P.E.s after a friend’s ex-boyfriend found out in his thirties that he was one. Hunter (not his real name) was a state-level politician who ran a campaign on his working-class roots, only to find out that his mother had had an affair with a well-off scientist. Hunter had known his biological father his whole life as a family friend; sometimes this man dropped off hand-me-downs that his sons—Hunter’s half brothers—had outgrown. Hunter told me that he had joined Facebook groups devoted to N.P.E.s but promptly left them. “It was too much,” he said.
It turns out that anger at your mother and a hobbyist’s understanding of genetics is a potent, and potentially politicized, combination. Some factions are trying to transform N.P.E.s from an identity group into an interest one. A guest on Wood’s podcast, for example, an N.P.E. named Richard, who is a clinician by profession, argued that people could be entitled to sue their mother for keeping the identity of their father secret, on the grounds of “parental alienation.” Severance, a magazine that covers N.P.E.s, was launched in 2019 by a Pennsylvanian writer named B. K. Jackson; it takes its name from a belief that N.P.E.s have been “severed” from their biological families. Alongside extramarital affairs, the magazine lists “adoption, kidnapping, undisclosed step-parent adoption, paternity fraud, donor-assisted conception” and “nonconsensual sex” as causes of severance. Such rhetoric, which places gamete donation next to criminal acts, has alarmed many in the L.G.B.T.Q. community, as has the legal-advocacy work of a Seattle-based organization founded by an N.P.E. called Right to Know. The group wants to mandate the inclusion of donor and surrogate names on birth certificates, which currently reflect legal, not genetic, parentage. Some in the L.G.B.T.Q. community fear that this will, by default, force them to report more information than opposite-sex couples are required to. In making its case, Right to Know can at times rely on nascent, controversial theories within the world of genomics, which many scientists caution overstate the impact of genes on our health and personalities.
In myth, if a hero wants to achieve greatness—to slay a multiheaded Hydra, to part the Red Sea, to bring balance to the Force—he is almost required to have a dramatic paternity reveal. But now millions of mere mortals are having to contend with the same epic dilemmas: What’s the appropriate amount of anger over an extramarital affair? Will our roots always tug at us, even if we don’t know they’re ours? Who or what, exactly, determines our destiny?
In 1999, the producers of “Maury” came to their host, Maury Povich, with an idea to boost ratings. “These soap operas—they take six months to reveal someone’s secret father,” Povich remembered them saying. “We can do that in fifteen minutes, on air.” The show became known for its flamboyant paternity-test reveals, and for men, suddenly off the hook for child support, doing celebratory dances. Povich told me, “People come up to me all the time on the street. They like to grab their pregnant wife and get me to say, ‘You are the father.’ ” His show was controversial; scholars have accused it of reinforcing stereotypes about Black women’s promiscuity, but nonetheless it became a cultural touchstone. In a 2015 “Saturday Night Live” “Weekend Update” segment about Black History Month, Michael Che joked about Povich: “He set more Black men free than Abraham Lincoln.” Povich’s show was also an unlikely educational resource. In the nineties, DNA was the stuff of science fiction—I first heard about it in “Jurassic Park”—but here it was something real, with real-life consequences.
The scholar Nara B. Milanich, in her book “Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father,” observes that, in the past, “biological paternity was considered an ineffable enigma of nature, not just unknown but indeed unknowable.” For much of the twentieth century, the closest thing to a paternity test was the ABO blood-type test, invented in 1924 by a German doctor named Fritz Schiff. But that test could only exclude a possible father, not positively identify one. Then, in 1984, a British geneticist named Alec Jeffreys discovered DNA fingerprinting, which allowed scientists to take a sample of hair, skin, or saliva and single out a sequence of nucleotides specific to one person. But such testing was intended for professionals in a lab. That all changed when a retired business owner in Texas had some extra time on his hands.
People had always asked Bennett Greenspan whether he was related to the economist Alan Greenspan. “I had no answer,” he said. He had never met Alan Greenspan and had never heard that he was a distant relation. Most of us in his position would simply have replied no, but Greenspan, now seventy-three, had been fascinated by genealogy since he was a child. He once brought an empty chart to a shiva, where he mined his elderly Eastern European relatives for intel. He always felt that there were “paper-trail roadblocks” stopping him from getting a full picture of his family tree.
In 1997, Greenspan read an article in the Times about a group of geneticists who had tested the Y chromosomes of Jewish men who believed themselves to be part of an ancient priestly tradition called the cohanim. He called Michael Hammer, one of the researchers quoted in the story, who ran a lab at the University of Arizona, and asked to buy a DNA test; Greenspan figured that, if science could try to trace Jewish men alive today to Aaron and Mt. Sinai, there might be hope for his family tree. Hammer told him that his DNA tests were for anthropological purposes only. Greenspan countered with a technique he had learned from sales, which was to let an awkward silence emerge. Hammer fell for it, interjecting, “Someone should start a company for this, because I get calls from crazy genealogists like you all the time.” Hammer and the University of Arizona agreed to let Greenspan run direct-to-consumer tests out of their lab for a fee, and, in 2000, FamilyTreeDNA, the first home DNA-testing kit, was born. Greenspan remembered getting calls from confused customers: “These brothers called and they go, ‘We think your test is wrong—we two match, but our little brother doesn’t.’ I said, ‘Come on.’ ”