The acclaimed writer A. M. Homes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with a family of his own. The Mistress’s Daughter is the ruthlessly honest account of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her. Homes relates how they initially made contact and what happened afterwards, and digs through the family history of both sets of her parents in a twenty-first-century electronic search for self. Daring, heartbreaking, and startlingly funny, Homes’s memoir is a brave and profoundly moving consideration of identity and family.
There is no doubt that Ms. Homes is a very good writer. Interesting from beginning pages to end, this book is engrossing. The (true) story is fluid and dramatic, without hyperbole and unnecessary adjectives. The experience of discovering and coping with her birth parents was initially thrust upon her, which makes the reader sympathize with Homes, although one could say that about any adoptee who finds out about their natural connections, and encounters Real Life and very real people, vs. their childhood dreams of fantasy parents. Once caught up in the discoveries and personalites, Homes, as a bright, hard-working, naturally curious person, continues to discover more and more, which means a lot of gutsy moves, difficult realizations, and some painful times. The emotional struggles and ultimate fascination with the various personalities, her ancestry, and the uneasiness of people about the subject of her existence makes this an achingly sensitive tale. It's also has plenty of humor lighting the way. The reactions of her adoptive family are interesting as well. I'm sure that any thoughtful reader cannot, about halfway through the book, help but start thinking about their own family and their place in it, as well as the legacies, of both nature and nurture, that help make each of us the way we are. Highly recommended.
writes,
In her autobiography The Mistress's Daughter, novelist A.M. Homes writes about meeting her biological parents 31 years after they gave her up for adoption. She wrote the first half of the book as a 2004 New Yorker essay on what she describes as "the most ethereal and biological emotional experience of her life to date." Homes succeeds wildly at transporting the reader to this emotional turmoil with her sparse, haunting language. She uses her gifts as a novelist to propel the reader along her journey to find and then to lose her biological parents.
Book One, "The Mistress's Daughter," which was excerpted in the New Yorker, probes family and self. Ellen (the clingy ex-mistress) and Norman (the arrogant, lecherous married man) contact their biological daughter and request a reunion. Homes is wary of the pair, and is soon being stalked by her needy mother and swept under the rug by her all-about-appearances father. Of Ellen she writes, ""The more Ellen and I talk, the happier I am that she gave me up." Book Two is comprised of several essays about Homes's decades-later exploration of her parents' lives and genealogy. Homes wrote the book of a period of years, and her narrative is the strongest in Book One, perhaps because she has edited and distanced herself the most from those early meetings. Book Two is meandering and haphazard (even boring, when genealogy is recounted in tedious detail), but no less fierce.
writes,
Last 20 pages of book were awful, basically a recap of the whole book. So much left unanswered, for her and the reader. I wondered if this was a universal adoptee experience/emotional state, or if the author was unique. Would have liked to know more about the bio family whom she seemed to dismiss as part of the process.
