Customer Reviews

The Mistress's Daughter

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

I was eagerly awaiting the release of this book. I just finished it and as an adoptee, I think A.M. Homes got the tone just right. She honestly deals with the feelings that are prevalent in many adoptees. Hers was an interesting story without the happy ending, but she seems to come away stronger for it and realize she is a composite of nature and nurture, not just a biological product of one set of parents. I agree that the second half is a little scattered and not as concise as in the brilliant first half, previously published in the New Yorker. As for those reviewers who criticized her "imaginings," that is pretty much all most adoptees have. There is little reality to their existence, just what they have been told. Recommended for adoptees, anyone who is struggling with identity issues or those who just appreciate an interesting story.

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

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.

I am adopted and I too found my birthfamily. I picked up this book expecting to read about someone who felt some of the same things I did, like the confusion and ambivalence over heritage, identity and obligations. I found very little of that. In fact, it was very difficult for me to relate to any of the three central people in this story (the author and her birthparents) because these are three of the most selfish, self-centered people. Reading this story, all I could think of was that the apple does not fall far from the tree. It seemed like all they thought about what was what was in it for each of them and then they all spent the rest of the time bemoaning the demands the other put on them.

In particular, the author shuns her birthmother and seems to have a lot of anger toward her. She won't see her or call her and derides her insecurities. Yet she jumps through hoops for her birthfather. In the end, after much ado, her birthfather refuses to see her or return her calls and they are forced to communicate through lawyers. Basically, he's treating her the same way she treated her birthmother and she doesn't like it. What goes around, comes around I guess.

The ironic thing I found is that after all her bellyaching about being denied her heritage, blah, blah, blah, she ends up having a fatherless child herself. I'll bet Freud would have a field day with that one!

The only person I felt any compassion for was the adoptive mother.

I devoured this book over a 24-hour time period (granted, I was on vacation and had more time available to read than I normally do). The topic is one that has always interested me, and I appreciated how honest and personal this account was.

However, the second half was largely uninteresting to me. I found myself skimming some of the pages. She could have probably given the reader a sense of her all-consuming internet and records-department genealogical search without dedicating half the book to it (and without including details about so many distant relatives that the reader couldn't hope to keep track of them all - nor did I care enough to try).

The real story, I thought, was in the first half of the book. It was a depressing account not only of the author's less than satisfying reunion with her biological parents, but also of the sense she always had of not belonging to anyone or to the world at large.

Because the book is so quick, I think it's probably worth a read if you're interested in the topic, especially if you can pick it up at the library (as I did). I wouldn't spend money on it to own it, though.

As an adoptee, I am always looking for books that speak frankly about adoption. So few books explore the emotional experience of the adoptee. I heard about this book on NPR Writers Almanac. They read one sentence, which caught my immediate attention. I went straight home and ordered it.

I was awed and humbled by the way AM Homes absolutely nailed what it feels like to be an adoptee. She put words to my feelings.

I found this to be an amazing book. I couldn't have loved it more. It's a very quick read, but touches on the essence of what it feels like to be an emotional amputee, sewn back together again.

I applaud her work and wish it were my own. It feels like it is.

Reading this book had a true impact on my emotional being and gave me an awareness of feelings like none other I have read. Although Ms.Homes' circumstances could possibly be so different than other adoptees, as in my case, it still holds the ingredients, the written contents, of what an adoptee feels & experiences, aware or not, during their lifetime, searching or not. I can see how a reader without the adoption experience might not find this book as stimulating as her other works, but as an adoptee, I found myself completely immersed in it, wanting to hear more of what felt like MY voice giving words to many moments in an adoptee's life, that are so confusing & sometimes belittling. I found myself calling close friends, and my b-sister, a younger sister who I just discovered at age 46, quoting passages. I did this because the author was so accurate in describing how adoption was conducted in the 60s, as well as the previous two decades, & how the search, by a b-mom,or the adoptee, can open a mass Pandora's box of emotions. Thank you, Ms. Homes, for giving us a voice; now, if others will listen.