The Mistress's Daughter: A Memoir (Hardcover)

by A. M. Homes (Author)

Editorial Reviews

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.)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
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