Product Description

An acclaimed novelist’s riveting memoir about what it means to be adopted and how all of us construct our sense of self and family

Before A.M. Homes was born, she was put up for adoption. Her birth mother was a twenty-two- year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with children of his own. The Mistress’s Daughter is the story of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her.

Homes, renowned for the psychological accuracy and emotional intensity of her storytelling, tells how her birth parents initially made contact with her and what happened afterward (her mother stalked her and appeared unannounced at a reading) and what she was able to reconstruct about the story of their lives and their families. Her birth mother, a complex and lonely woman, never married or had another child, and died of kidney failure in 1998; her birth father, who initially made overtures about inviting her into his family, never did.

Then the story jumps forward several years to when Homes opens the boxes of her mother’s memorabilia. She had hoped to find her mother in those boxes, to know her secrets, but no relief came. She became increasingly obsessed with finding out as much as she could about all four parents and their families, hiring researchers and spending hours poring through newspaper morgues, municipal archives and genealogical Web sites. This brave, daring, and funny book is a story about what it means to be adopted, but it is also about identity and how all of us define our sense of self and family.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #623603 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Novelist Homes's searing 2004 New Yorker essay about meeting her biological parents 31 years after they gave her up for adoption forms the first half of this much-anticipated memoir, but the rest of the book doesn't match its visceral power. The first part, distilled by more than a decade's reflection and written with haunting precision, recounts Homes's unfulfilling reunions with both parents in 1993 after her birth mother, Ellen Ballman, contacted her. Homes (This Book Will Change Your Life,) learns that Ballman became pregnant at age 22, after being seduced by Norman Hecht, the married owner of the shop where Ballman worked. But Ballman's emotional neediness and the more upwardly mobile Hecht's unwillingness to fully acknowledge Homes as a family member shakes Homes's deepest sense of self. The rest of the memoir is a more undigested account of how Ballman's death pushed Homes to research her genealogy. Hecht's refusal to help Homes apply to the Daughters of the American Revolution based on their shared lineage elicits her "nuclear-hot" rage, which devolves into a list of accusing questions she would ask him about his life choices in a mock L.A. Law episode. The final chapter is a loving but tacked-on tribute to Homes's adoptive grandmother that may leave readers wishing the author had given herself more time to fully integrate her adoptive and biological selves. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Michael Mewshaw

In 2004 the New Yorker published an excerpt from A.M. Homes's memoir, The Mistress's Daughter. Stylish, provocative and deeply personal, the piece dealt with the author's adoption and reunion with her biological parents. Such stories often have the cloying inevitability of Hallmark cards, but Homes deployed the same gimlet eye and ironic sensibility that distinguish her fiction. The book, which was said to be forthcoming, held out tantalizing promise.

Homes's birth mother, Ellen, had sought her out, seemingly driven less by the desire to meet the child she had given up than by personal demons. "You should adopt me and take good care of me," Ellen declared. When her baffled daughter didn't respond enthusiastically enough, Ellen phoned on Valentine's Day and told her, "You can just go to the roof of your building and jump off."

As a teenager in Washington, Ellen had worked for a wealthy, older married man who took her as his mistress, strung her along with promises to leave his wife, then dumped her when she became pregnant. It gradually crosses Homes's mind that Ellen may be more interested in reconnecting with her ex-lover than with her.

As for Homes's biological father, Norman, he arranges to rendezvous with Homes in a hotel bar and gives the creepy impression that he might shift his lecherous feelings to his daughter. Like Ellen, he has no interest in Homes's needs or emotions. When not treating her as a tart, he infantilizes her, sending a gold locket for her 32nd birthday, a gift that's "more like pre-jewelry, like a training bra." Promising to accept her into his family and introduce her to her half-siblings, he asks only that she submit to a DNA test. But when the test proves his paternity, he distances himself. It dawns on Homes that he had been hoping for an excuse to exclude her from his family and estate.

While Norman keeps Homes in a separate compartment of his life, much as he did with his mistress, Ellen intrudes at every opportunity, even stalking Homes at literary events. When Ellen suffers serious medical problems, she expects Homes to donate a kidney. Not surprisingly, Homes reacts with a mixture of curiosity and revulsion, and a pulse of rage starts to beat against the sassy attitude the author tries to strike. When irony proves inadequate, the harried daughter pulls away. Yet after Ellen dies, Homes feels haunted by "the profound loss of a piece of myself that I never knew, a piece that I pushed away because it was so frightening."

Roughly at this point, the excerpt in the New Yorker ended. Now, more than two years later, with the complete book in hand, one suspects that Homes had difficulty discovering material that lived up to the early chapter. Seven years after Ellen's death, Homes unpacks the poor woman's personal effects, and when this doesn't lead her to deeper understanding, she falls back on fiction and imagines Ellen's love affair with her father. A friend rightly objects, "You're making it up." To which the author lamely responds, "The only other option is for someone to tell me how it was, what really happened."

Actually, there were alternatives. If she was contractually obligated to produce a book, she might have made a more determined effort to track down sources who could tell her "what really happened." Instead, like a diligent grad student or an amateur genealogist, she turns from people to paper, from dramatic scenes to a computer screen, from factual research to endless Googling. And in the process her memoir disperses into a pattern of unconnected dots, like a newspaper photograph held too close to the eye.

Near the end, it appears that she'll sue Norman and through legal discovery obtain not just a copy of her DNA test, but vital family information that she -- and the reader -- yearns for. Meticulously, she sets down 15 pages of questions for a possible deposition, but then never supplies a single answer, never explains what became of the dispute. Closing with another unsatisfying digression, this one about her adoptive grandmother and her own daughter, she makes a reader wonder whether she might have been wiser to leave things as they stood with the appearance of that excellent piece in the New Yorker.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Critics agree that the first part of A. M. Homes's book, an expanded version of a 2004 New Yorker essay, is a riveting family story. Told in the same taut prose that gives her fiction (In a Country of Mothers, 1993; Music for Torching, 1999) its "stylish nihilism" (New York Times), The Mistress's Daughter offers a straightforward, unblinking account of meeting—and facing—one's birth parents for the first time. The mixed reviews stem from an equally mixed bag of reactions. A few critics decry the dramatic drop-off when Homes expands the scope of her genealogical research outside her two birth parents. Others find the author's indignation and tightly controlled rage poignant. Homes treads the memoirist's paper-thin line between self-discovery and egocentrism with marginal success.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Brutally honest and touching
While I think it is possible for anyone to appreciate the beautiful writing and the touching story of The Mistress's Daughter, it surely carries special meaning for adoptees. I am quite sure that I am not the only adoptee who nodded her head throughout the book as Homes articulated so many of the thoughts I have had about myself and my family through the years. Another reviewer complained that Homes was only speculating about her birth parent's lives in the second half of the book, yet that was exactly the point. After years with thousands of questions and no answers, adoptees who have met their birth parents are usually met with the disappointing realization that they will never have all the answers. The speculation never ends. Homes' book was note-perfect in capturing that and so many other aspects of the adoption experience. I usually give away my books after I read them, but I will be reading this one again.

I feel compelled to address one other issue. As an adoptee, I found one reviewer's headline, "A Case For Abortion", to be incredibly offensive. I am pro-choice, but telling an adoptee they should have been aborted simply because you don't like what they wrote is disgusting. I too question the motives of some of the negative reviewers, some of whom clearly did not read the book.

Recommended
Interesting that the two negative reviews posted so far come from people in Washington - wonder who they are and how they are connected to the story??

I read this book in about 3 hours in one sitting and was absolutely fascinated. Rather than being a typical story of an adopted child who rediscovers her wonderful birth parents, A.M. Homes is truthful about her fears and the emotional rollercoaster this information sends her on. Her relationships with her newly discovered biological parents are unsatisfying for various reasons and she struggles with her feelings and definition of what a family is. I thought the book offered a very interesting perspective and was well done. Recommended!

If you love her fiction--you'll be further impressed
I couldn't put down---I've been reading Homes work for many years--going back to her first novel Jack--and on through the terrifying End of Alice--the smart stories in Things You Should Know and last year's inspiring, This Book Will Save Your Life. Now Homes is letting us into her life--giving her readers the back story on who she is. And it's a real case of truth being stranger than fiction. I admire her for letting us in, for sharing the incredible sadness of finding out who her biological parents were--both of them seem soo incredibly self involved, narcisistic--in the end it's a good thing that Homes' was adopted by a family who seemed to truly "get" her and to support her artistic endeavors. This is a heartbreaking and wonderful read--and really informative for those of us who don't know the world of adoption--of searching and reunion with lost family. I really enjoyed the second half of the book--which takes the reader on a kind of wild ride though the land of internet geneology and search for self.