Meant to Be

For many years, Parade magazine's Walter Anderson, one of America's most admired editors, harbored a deep secret about his heritage and the circumstances of his birth. With the publication of this affecting memoir, he reveals the truth about his life and tells the inspirational story of his rags-to-riches career.

Anderson grew up on the "wrong side of the tracks" in Mount Vernon, New York, the youngest child of an alcoholic, abusive father. He escaped his situation by quitting high school at sixteen to join the Marines. Four years later, while on leave to attend his father's funeral, he stuns his mother with a question that has inexplicably haunted him since he was a small boy: Was the man who had so tormented him in his childhood his real father? Her answer: Walter was born of a wartime love affair between his Protestant mother and the Jewish man she loved. His mother swears him to secrecy, and he honors their pact for nearly thirty-five years, and then one day he meets an unknown brother -- another son of his real father -- who has lived a similar, nearly parallel life. Their secret, in ways large and small, defines the course of his life.

Meant To Be is a love story, a journey of self-discovery and spiritual reckoning, and a provocative challenge to commonly held notions about the role of heredity in our lives. Passionately told and deeply moving, Anderson's memoir is the mesmerizing story that he was always meant to tell.

Walter Anderson has been editor of Parade since June 1980. He is a member of the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Sciences, and he serves on the boards of Literacy Volunteers of America, the National Center for Family Literacy, the National Dropout Prevention Fund, Very Special Arts, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and PBS.

He received a 1994 Hortio Alger Award, for which he was nominated by the late Norman Vincent Peale, and the Jewish National Fund's Tree of Life Award, which he received from Elie Wiesel. He lives in White Plains, New York, with his wife Loretta. They have two children.