Writers of PhDs have a unique, personal and in-depth relationship with their subject matter, which develops over a number of years. What happens when life intrudes so much into the reading and writing that it takes over the subject matter, so that the original struggle for objective scholarship threatens to become subsumed in emotion and self-discovery? The supervisor can do worse than guide their student towards the genre of life writing, within which a flourishing of sub-genres may be accommodating to such a journey. For an Australian closed-records adoptee caught up in the reunion processes sparked by the 1990 changes to the Adoption Act, critical readings of Peter Carey, Janette Turner Hospital and Luke Davies developed into the invention of the Adopted Body, the Subject Adoptee and a new way of seeing: ado/aptive reading and writing. Perhaps in the field of ado/aptive theory, the stolen generations, inter-country adoptees and the white closed-record adoptees of Australia can re-invent themselves, develop their identities and create a genre of academic theory unique to Australia.