A.M. Homes' The Mistress' Daughter

While waiting in line at the ferry terminal (I know, I wasn’t on a bus, but ferries are basically giant buses that travel over water), I did what I usually do -- I searched the covers of books people held, looking for a title to catch my eye.

One girl standing next to me was devouring a little novel called The Mistress’s Daughter. The girl on the front cover just looked so forlorn that I immediately wondered what the book was about and why the person who held it was reading it.

As it turns out, The Mistress’s Daughter isn’t a novel at all, but a memoir from A.M. Homes, an American novelist and screenwriter, best known for her novel This Book Will Save Your Life.

In her memoir, Homes, who was adopted at a young age, details the painful reunion (and ensuing events) she endured with her biological parents, as she uncovered the sordid history of her parents’ past and her own beginnings:

“Christmas 1992, I go home to Washington, D.C. ‘We have something to tell you,’ my mother says. ‘Someone is looking for you.’ After a lifetime spent in a virtual witness-protection program, I’ve been exposed. I am the mistress’s daughter. My birth mother was young, unmarried, and my father older with a family of his own,” she writes.

As the story goes, Homes’ birth mother, Ellen, became involved with a married man when she was a teenager, who then dumped her when she became pregnant. Swell guy. When Homes is in her thirties, her birth mother seeks her out, asking her to “take good care of me.” Homes suspects that Ellen just wants to reconnect with daddy dearest.

Homes eventually meets her biological father, Norman, but his empty promises leave her feeling even more conflicted – Norman tells Homes he will introduce her to his family, her half-siblings, only to renege on the deal after a paternity test proves he is her dad. Ellen, meanwhile, imposes herself on Homes’ life in a number of ways, stalking her and begging her for a kidney. Ellen’s eventual death sends Homes into a whirlwind of confusing, conflicting feelings.

The Mistress’ Daughter appears to be an exploration of themes like identity and belonging, framed in the story of an adult woman who still deals emotionally with her adoption.

As Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club, puts it, “The Mistress's Daughter has the beguiling pull of mystery, memory and surprise... It lays bare those questions about our essential selves: How did we become who we are? What elements of inheritance, neglect, accident and choice gave us our confused identity, our quirky personality, our urges to be wholly loved?”

Homes, who wrote for the TV drama The L Word, has the reputation of being a private person. "What can I tell you about my family life? I have one child, I live in New York City, I have a dog and, you know, a really busy life," she said in an interview with bookpage.com, where she details the experience of writing her memoir.

“One of the hardest things about it was taking something that was so emotional and psychological and finding words for it. It's an emotional experience that's very primitive. It's the basic experience of being separated from your parents,” she said.

Unlike a novel, where threads are likely to be wrapped up, Homes' memoir probably offers little closure for Homes and others seeking the answers to questions like 'Who am I?' But that's how life is, and Homes acknowledges that, even coming to accept the fact that her birth father's family might see him in an entirely diffferent light:

"As you grow up you just realize that life is more complicated and people are more complicated than they first appear, which is kind of a great thing and kind of hard to deal with. It's hard to reconcile and accept that people who are capable of great things also do horrible things. But the sophisticated approach is to realize that a person can be different and behave differently in different situations."