Uprooted is the true story of an adoptee's thirty-year search for her biological roots. Relinquished at birth in a closed-adoption state, her records sealed and her birth certificate overwritten, Sarah grows up in Florida with a loving adoptive family, but in a house that also holds addiction, violence, and mental illness. Decades later, a chance DNA match finally cracks the sealed story open, and the trail leads back to the Tennessee mountains and a birth mother named Georgina Mae.
Set against a regenerative Appalachian farm and, later, a Tennessee homestead where Sarah ends up “where she literally began,” Uprooted braids adoption and reunion, inherited trauma, grief, and the slow work of growing something from broken ground. It's earthy and lyrical and funny in the same breath, and it asks the question underneath every adoption story: who counts as the real mother, and what do we owe the people who made us.
The Book At-A-Glance:
Title:Uprooted: A Memoir of Belonging and Becoming
Byline on the book: S. B. Long
Bio name: Dr. Sarah Long
Publisher: Regal House Publishing (Raleigh, NC)
Author: PhD, full professor of rhetoric & writing at Appalachian State (Boone); narrative-medicine practitioner; TEDx speaker; President of Slow Food Tri-Cities (Johnson City); founder of The Writing Cure.
Awards: Bridport Prize shortlist; Readers Choice Award
The one-line: an adoptee traces her birth family to the Tennessee mountains during the pandemic, only to learn her birth mother died six months before she could reach her. Closed adoption, inherited trauma, grief, land, and re-authoring a life you can stand to live inside.
Where to Buy & Review
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Uprooted-belonging-becoming-S-B-Long/dp/1646037170
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/uprooted-a-memoir-of-belonging-and-becoming-s-b-long/5b2f015417ce8c7e?ean=9781646037179
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/uprooted-sb-long/1148336832?ean=9781646037179
Regal House Publishing: https://regal-house-publishing.mybigcommerce.com/uprooted/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/241952474-uprooted
Reading & Discussion Guide
Download the reading and discussion guide for bookclubs, interviews, and workshops.
Watch the TEDx talk
You can watch the TEDx talk here or on this page of The Writing Cure, along with two other talks by Dr. Rita Charon and Dr. James Pennebaker.
Media & press Use
Thank you for your interest in Uprooted: A Memoir of Belonging and Becoming (Regal House Publishing, 2026) and in the work of S. B. Long. This page covers what you are free to use and how.
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Corrections and questions
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Reader Reviews
“I’ve long marveled at S.B. Long’s unsurpassed gift for narrative, brilliantly displayed in her extraordinary new memoir, Uprooted, a tale as powerfully and imaginatively rendered as the very best fiction. Harrowing, heartbreaking, unimaginably candid, often outrageous, and ultimately triumphant, Uprooted does not relax its spell and frisson until its final remarkable sentence. This is a courageous, necessary book by a master storyteller.”
—Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014) & author of Too Glorious to Even Long for on Certain Days
— Elizabeth Barbour, Adoptee, Adoptive Mother, and author of Sacred Celebrations
“I laughed out loud on one page and had tears running down my face by the next. That whiplash is not a flaw in the pacing; it's the truth of the story she's telling. Long's life has been marked by abuse, betrayal, heartache, and mental health struggles, and she doesn't flinch from any of it. What she does instead is write her way through it, with humor and honesty in equal measure. Uprooted is not an easy read, but it is an essential one — for adoptees, for birth parents, for adoptive parents, and for anyone who has ever had to piece together who they are from fragments. S.B. Long has given us a rare thing: a memoir that is as generous and funny as it is devastating and true.”
“There are memoirs you read because someone’s life is interesting, and then there are memoirs that—unexpectedly or not—quietly start excavating your own life while you’re reading them. S.B. Long’s 'Uprooted' did the latter for me.”
— Angela Eward-Mangione