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Some adoptees spend their lives wondering about their origins. Patricia Knight Meyer spent hers wondering if she was a stolen child.

Handed over as an infant along a Texas hospital curb in 1970—no judge, no paperwork, no questions asked—Patricia grew up haunted by nightmares of "The Dark Man," unaware her parents had no  

legal claim to her. Blackmailed by the attorney they hired to skirt the adoption system, her parents faced an impossible choice: pay up or give back the baby. 

They paid $30,000 and lived in constant fear that someone could come back for her. Meanwhile, Patricia navigated a childhood marked by her mother's violent alcoholism and her 600-pound father's helpless devotion—a family built on a foundation of fraud.

Raised by people with no legal claim to her, for 47 years Patricia used papers obtained with lies.

Wonderland follows Patricia's decades-long quest to untangle the web of extortion and trafficking that erased her identity. Part detective story, part searing family portrait, this house of cards memoir exposes what happens when falsified documents and black-market dealings can no longer sustain the weight of one woman's relentless search for truth. 

Patricia's story is an Alice in Wonderland descent into a surreal landscape where nothing is as it seems—where arbitrary authority enforces nonsensical rules to protect an industry in which demand for infants outweighs concern for their futures, where desperate parents become complicit criminals, and where children vanish into legal limbo.

A haunting reckoning with Baby Scoop Era exploitation that asks: as reproductive rights disappear, are we ready for Baby Scoop 2.0?

"In Wonderland Patricia Knight Meyer excavates her own identity through deep layers of trauma and trafficking, loss and longing. It is a brutal story—abuse, addiction, assault—told by an unflinching narrator, determined to document the divergence between adoption's beautiful promises and what can happen when maternal desperation meets back alley need and greed. It is a coming-of-age story, a personal mystery, and a heartfelt reckoning all in one."   — Gretchen Sisson, Sociologist and author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. 

"In an absorbing and fast-moving narrative, Meyer conveys the complexity of the adoptee’s inner life, shaped by uncertainty, hypervigilance, and deep, hearty - sometimes incongruous - love. As a black-market baby handed over to her adoptive parents with no papers and no questions asked, Meyer has less information than many adoptees about her origins. She’s left with hounding questions about where she came from, who cared for her between being born and sold, and why she was placed with the deeply dysfunctional family she nevertheless adored. Survival within her adoptive home is a constant focus, and adoption is ever-present, a force that expands and contracts her world, an alternately frightening and exhilarating wonderland. 

Patricia’s writing is at once deeply personal, with intimate scenes of her childhood filled with colorful characters rooted in the south, and expansive, tracing the history of black market adoption in the United States. Throughout, Meyer offers penetrating insights into the singular perspective of an adopted person. Arriving at key answers but no easy resolution, the story powerfully communicates the inhumanity of an industry that treats children as commodities while depriving them of the right to knowledge about their origins. More broadly, it reflects on the cost of adoption itself, a system that profits from separating families, leaving lifelong trauma for all involved and only fragments of identity with which an adopted person may build."  — Amy Seek, author of GOD AND JETFIRE