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Summary
Summary
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.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Homes is a Tilt-a-whirl novelist who discloses ordinary existence's hidden bizarreness, most recently in This Book Will Save Your Life 0 (2006). She now presents a can't-put-it-down memoir as remarkable for its crystalline prose, flinty wit, and agile candor as for its arresting revelations. Readers will recognize the true-life source of Homes' novel In a Country of Mothers0 (1993) as she recounts the fraught circumstances of her irregular adoption: baby Homes was handed over on the street like contraband. Homes knows nothing about her birth parents until she turns 31, and learns that her mother was only 17 when she and her married-with-children boss began an affair that abruptly ended when both his mistress and his wife became pregnant. Homes navigates distressing, often surreal interactions with the demanding strangers who provided her DNA. Then, after her mother's unnerving death, she embarks on an extensive genealogical quest to trace both biological and adopted bloodlines. Homes masterfully distills angst and discovery into a riveting tale of nature and nurture that encompasses America's great patchwork of immigrants and secrets; a double-helix legacy entwining Christian slaveholders with Jewish refugees; and, as she brings her daughter into the world, the evolution of women's lives. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AS a novelist, A.M. Homes has made a minor speciality of luridness. In all of her writing there is a latent sense that a crime has been or is about to be committed. Her memoir, "The Mistress's Daughter," is no exception: it has the same foreboding, the same ambience of barely controlled menace. It opens with the sentence: "I remember their insistence that I come into the living room and sit down and how the dark room seemed suddenly threatening, how I stood in the kitchen doorway holding a jelly doughnut and how I never eat jelly doughnuts." And as Homes moves through her account of her origins, the prevailing mood is that of film noir. Homes was 31 when she was contacted by her biological mother, Ellen Ballman. It emerges that her real father, Norman Hecht, was Ellen's boss - older, married, an exfootball player, with children of his own. Homes tells us that she was adopted by a couple whose own son had died six months earlier. Before they brought her home, "the trusted pediatrician" was "dispatched to the hospital to make an evaluation of the merchandise - think of movies where the drug dealer samples the stuff before turning over the cash." Such details will be familiar to readers of Homes's fiction: a lawyer from "In a Country of Mothers" calls the adoptive parents and says, "your package has arrived and it's wrapped in pink ribbons." Like Bret Easton Ellis, A.M. Homes writes sleek, violent cartoons of contemporary existence, and it's fascinating to watch this novelist of extremes handle the delicate material of her own life. Homes's imagination inhabits the wildest shores of satire, where a bored husband and wife not only have affairs but smoke crack and set fire to their suburban house with a grill; where a wife who is a little angry with her husband after a party cuts his neck with a kitchen knife; where a fat man is envisioned "chewing on the small bones of a roasted baby something - chicken, lamb, child." There is rage behind this stylish nihilism, and it finds its purest expression in this memoir: the figures in Homes's life often behave as if she had invented them. Her biological mother calls when Homes neglects to send a valentine: "You can just go to the roof of your building and jump off." And after she gets in touch with her biological father, he takes her to hotels where they sit in fern bars like an illicit couple. Homes herself lurks in a parked car outside his house and sees a girl pulling back a curtain. ("Is she my sister?") There is a lot of stalking in "The Mistress's Daughter." Other, more potentially ordinary moments turn sinister. The needle piercing Homes's skin during a DNA test is "beyond sexual." Describing a book reading, she writes: "From the moment I arrive, I have the sense they are there - exactly who, I am not sure - but I can tell I am being watched, sized up. There is the strange sensation that something else is going on - there are people here who have come for a reason other than to hear me read." The relentless flatness and darkness of Homes's imagination is both explained and exploited in the pages of her memoir. A.M. Homes in the mid-1960s. In one of the book's more powerful scenes, Homes imagines driving a car into the wall of her adoptive parents' house. She is enraged, but she stops herself when she remembers how much her adoptive mother loves her china. Next, she imagines going inside, taking the dishes off the shelves and then driving the car into the wall, "though it wouldn't be quite the same." It is in these rogue moments of tenderness that one feels her psychological quandary: how caught she is between wanting to live in the house and wanting to smash it to pieces. Of course, a situation where extra parents suddenly turn up after one is fully grown lends itself to strangeness, almost to kitsch. Her new mother sends Homes a child's birthday card shaped like a teddy bear and signed "Love, Mommy Ellen." Her new father gives her a heart-shaped locket appropriate for a little girl. Homes agrees to meet Ellen at the Oyster Bar of the Plaza, with all of its evocations of Eloise. The woman arrives in a ratty white fur jacket, and orders Harveys Bristol Cream. That is the last time Homes sees her before she dies of kidney disease. In many ways, this book is really about a wild goose chase. There is no epiphany here. In all the moments when some shimmering self might rise intact from the detritus, it does not. In the cardboard boxes with her mother's possessions (which Homes labels with a characteristic lack of euphemism, "Dead Ellen 1-4") she finds nothing to provide some unaccustomed comfort in the world, nothing that will save her - only containers filled with sheet music, unopened bills, phone messages and receipts, some of which she puts in ministorage. And then, as if an active part of this psychological spectacle, the second half of the book falls to pieces. Homes begins an obsessive search on the Internet for her antecedents, even hiring two researchers to help her. What follows is a random, frantic amassing of detail. She uncovers biographical fragments about people who are related to her, and some who are not. She muses on the general difficulties of her relatives' immigrant experience. But somehow in this wild quest for identity she loses focus, and in the process, any remnant of narrative control. Where, one begins to feel along with her, is A.M. Homes? STILL, if "The Mistress's Daughter" is not entirely satisfying, if it loses some of its furious precision - its perverse, artful inquisition into the motives of its principals - as a document of a flawed, incoherent self, it remains fierce and eloquent. And even some of its messier sections are gripping. Take the chapter in which Homes writes an imaginary deposition for her biological father. It consists of a list of questions running down the page: "Did you ask your daughter to meet you in hotels? Why not coffee shops? What is the nature of your thoughts about your daughter?" In its hallucinatory way, this list fairly accurately represents the true plot of the book: the questions Homes wanted to ask, the answers she will never receive. As she writes, "I will always be something glued together, something slightly broken." She also says, "I do not want this to be the most depressing story ever told" - though one imagines if there is anyone on earth who could write such a story it could well be Homes. But this book veers toward the sentimental, concluding with an unusually straightforward tribute to her inspiring adoptive grandmother. Here the reader cannot help thinking of the ferocity of Homes's fiction: the suburban house going up in flames, the gunshots in the mall. Normally, she is not one to reach for consoling niceties, for flourishes of redemption and images of human endurance. How can the ruthless author of "Music for Torching" and "The Safety of Objects" allow herself this easy way out of a story that can have no easy way out? It feels false. What does not feel false is a sentence on the last page: "I am my mother's child and I am my mother's child, I am my father's child and I am my father's child, and if that line is a little too much like Gertrude Stein, then I might be a little bit her child too." As Homes moves through her account of her origins, the prevailing mood is that of film noir. Katie Roiphe is the author of the forthcoming "Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles, 1910-1939."
Kirkus Review
Adopted as a newborn, novelist Homes (This Book Will Save Your Life, 2006, etc.) finally meets her biological parents. The author embarked on this journey of self-discovery after being contacted by her biological mother, who gave birth to Homes as a result of an affair with her married employer at a Washington, D.C., dress shop. Ellen Ballman never wed, and she appears a lonely, erratic and needy lost soul to her 31-year-old daughter. Uneasy and frightened, Homes pushes her away, basically avoiding all but sporadic telephone contact after one face-to-face meeting. Upon learning of her death, Homes gathers Ballman's meager papers and belongings, putting them aside for seven years before sifting through them in an unsuccessful attempt to discover who she really was. Meanwhile, the author's biological father, still married with children, seems pleasant enough when she contacts him. They have several cordial lunches, and he persuades her to take a DNA test, which apparently confirms his paternity. But he never fulfills an early promise to introduce her to his family. Homes seems na™vely outraged by this, seemingly unaware how her presence around the Christmas dinner table might prove awkward for all concerned. Years later, after she has penned a thinly disguised magazine article about their relationship, he refuses to provide the DNA test and ceases all communication with her. We can't help but wonder why the author, who kept her emotionally fragile mother at arm's length, complains bitterly when her biological father does the same to her. Though fairly riveting in its early stages, the narrative sags noticeably when Homes launches a genealogical research project into both her biological and adoptive families. That exercise, like much of this unsatisfying and depressing story, proves to be of far more interest to the principals involved than to the reader. Ultimately off-putting and unappealing, due to a whiny, self-pitying attitude conveyed in overwrought prose. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In this nonfiction work, part of which previously appeared in The New Yorker, novelist Homes (In a Country of Mothers) explores her roots. At first, all she knew about her parentage was that she was adopted. But when she was 31, her birth mother reappeared, wanting to become involved in her life. Piece by piece, Homes learned more about her birth parents' lives, though their versions do not always match. She began to realize that her part in their relationship was almost incidental; both were more concerned with their own needs than with hers. Yet she was still compelled to try to understand their background and motivations, no matter how emotionally trying and painful. Homes draws you in from the first sentence and holds your interest throughout, sharing her fear, disappointment, pathos, and bathos. She creates a possible deposition scene with her birth father that is both devastating and brilliant, covering all the ground she has unearthed in her explorations. By the end, you'll feel glad that nurture rather than nature has been dominant in her upbringing. Highly recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/15/06.]-Gina Kaiser, Univ. of the Sciences Lib., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Book 1 The Mistress's Daughter | p. 3 |
| Book 2 Unpacking My Mother | p. 109 |
| The Electronic Anthropologist | p. 143 |
| My Father's Ass | p. 183 |
| Like an Episode of L.A. Law | p. 203 |
| My Grandmother's Table | p. 223 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 239 |
