| The Mistress's Daughter |  | Author: A. M. Homes
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
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Rating:  66 reviews
Sales Rank: 366,752
Media: Paperback
Pages: 238
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0143113313
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.734092
EAN: 9780143113317
ASIN: 0143113313
Publication Date: March 25, 2008
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Product Description
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.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 66
 Brutally honest and touching April 28, 2007
bookarts (Somewhere in CA USA)
43 out of 48 found this review helpful
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.
If you love her fiction--you'll be further impressed April 6, 2007
subway reader (New York City, USA)
30 out of 35 found this review helpful
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.
Turns on its head the conventional account of an adopted child May 29, 2007
Bookreporter.com (New York, New York)
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
A Google search of the term "genealogy" yields more than 47 million hits. With the growth of the Internet, it is indisputable that the impulse to trace one's ancestors has become a source of passionate engagement for many. Paralleling that phenomenon is the explosive popularity of the memoir genre. These trends converge with considerable power in A.M. Homes's frank and moving new memoir, THE MISTRESS'S DAUGHTER.
Recognized as a keen-eyed observer of contemporary society in her fiction (THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS, THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE), Homes shifts her vision inward with equal acuity in this work. During a visit to her adoptive parents in Washington, D.C. at Christmas 1992, she learns --- through the family lawyer who had arranged her private adoption in 1961 --- that her mother, Ellen Ballman, who gave birth to her at the age of 22, wants to make contact. Homes's birth was the culmination of a relationship Ellen had had with a married employer almost 20 years her senior.
At first, Homes's engagement with her mother is unsettling, as Ellen lurks around the fringes of the author's appearance at a Washington bookstore and peppers her with phone calls and letters. Their first real meeting, at New York's Plaza Hotel, is poignant, if awkward. After devouring a lobster dinner, Ellen seeks her daughter's forgiveness for giving her up. Homes readily grants it in that encounter, but tensions between them soon emerge. Ellen persists in reaching out to a child who is unwilling to reciprocate the feelings of a woman she considers strange and difficult.
Concealing the seriousness of her medical condition from her daughter, Ellen dies of kidney failure in 1998, and Homes waits until 2005 to open the four boxes of papers and personal effects she removes from her mother's house after her death. When she does, she discovers a bizarre assortment of materials that reveal a life combining incidents of petty crime with the struggle of a single woman simply to survive after her lover's devastating rejection and the loss of her child.
As needy as Ellen is, Homes paints an even more problematic picture of her father, Norman Hecht. He's a respected businessman and father of four, but, as portrayed by Homes, he's little more than a handsome, self-absorbed lout. Most of their encounters take place in hotel lobbies at his request, as if their own relationship has an illicit aspect to it. Shortly after their first meeting, Norman insists that they undergo DNA testing that reveals the near certainty of his paternity. Later, when Homes almost sheepishly applies for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, made possible by the English ancestry she traces to the mid-16th century through her paternal grandmother, Norman does everything possible to deny that he's her father.
Homes's prose is spare and uninflected, occasionally bringing to mind the work of Joan Didion ("To be adopted is to be adapted, to be amputated and sewn back together again. Whether or not you regain full function, there will always be scar tissue."). Repeatedly, she returns to this theme of brokenness or the absence of wholeness that has plagued her as a child of adoption. There is considerable emotion in the story's telling, but for the most part it bubbles below the surface of the narrative. The memoir's seriousness is leavened with occasional humor, most notably in Homes's account of Norman's difficulty finding an acceptable payment method for the DNA test.
Homes devotes her final chapter to a loving tribute to her adoptive mother's mother, a vibrant woman who died "unexpectedly" at the age of 99. She writes movingly of her grandmother's inspiration that resulted in Homes giving birth to a daughter at the age of 41, after two years of considerable effort. Somehow it seems fitting that this unusual family saga will continue at least into one more generation.
What gives this memoir its originality and emotional force is that it turns on its head the conventional account of an adopted child on a quest to find her birth parents and instead offers the story of an adult involuntarily introduced to them when they re-enter her life. Despite her initial lack of inclination to discover her roots, Homes finds the journey she's launched on by her birth parents' unexpected appearance a transformative and ultimately rewarding one. In the end, she offers a fitting benediction to this flawed and all-too-human pair: "Did I choose to be found? No. Do I regret it? No. I couldn't not know."
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg
Mesmerizing April 9, 2007
UES
17 out of 22 found this review helpful
You don't have to be an admirer of A.M. Homes' fiction to find her latest book, The Mistress's Daughter, absolutely fascinating. I had only read one of her collections of short stories, The Safety of Objects, and while it is beautifully written, I found it too odd for my taste. But the premise of this memoir --a birth mother who contacts her daughter thirty-one years after giving her up for adoption--seemed intriguing and after I started reading it, I was unable to stop. Homes is brutally honest in the telling of her story--a search for her roots and her identity that's sometimes desperate, often painful, but never less than mesmerizing.
Best memoir of 2007 thus far - Not just for adopted children May 22, 2007
jerseygirl_librarian (central NJ)
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
I have never read a more honest emotional account of the issues not only adoptee go through, but children dealing with absent parents in general. I thank the author for having the courage to write this because it really touched me and I feel it will do so for many others. I am not an adoptee but my biological father was absent my whole childhood and the issues I had with him as an adult are similar to the ones Amy goes through with Norman. I never knew there were others out there that experienced the emptiness emotions like I had for many years. My friend, who is an adoptee, had a very similar experience that Amy did with Ellen. I know my friend will benefit from this story.
It is very easy these days to find your lost relatives and I would like to mention that most libraries have paid subscriptions to the various genealogy databases and services that Amy ended up paying for. I have to agree with other reviewers that the chapter listing all her findings was a little bit redundant and could have been worded better or eliminated. Also, did anyone notice that Claire Bellman was spelt Clare and Claire various times through out the book? It was a bit confusing, but I assume they both are the same people.
I still give this book a 5 star and highly recommended in hopes that it touches others lives as it has for mine.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 66
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