From The Mistress’s Daughter:
“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. When I was born, a lawyer called my adoptive parents and said, ‘Your package has arrived. . . . ’ The fragile narrative, the plot of my life has been abruptly recast. In my dreams, my birth mother is the queen of queens, and she has made a fabulous life for herself, as ruler of the world, except for one missing link—me.”
The Mistress's Daughter
New York Magazine
April 1, 2007
For readers wondering how A.M. Homes, raised in a nurturing, progressive family in the suburbs of D.C., came to write stories of destructive dislocation, the novelist’s new memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter, offers a clue or three. In the early nineties, Homes, who always knew she was adopted, finally met her birth parents, and they didn’t quite live up to her fantasies of being the love child of Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag. Her birth father would only meet her in hotel lobbies, made her take a DNA test, and then refused to give her a copy of the (positive) report. (He recently told People magazine he wasn’t even her father.) His onetime mistress was a broken, lonely woman who seemed to need mothering of her own. Yet Homes, who finally completed the book after her birth mother’s death, doesn’t wallow in her disappointment. She spoke with New York about the pain of writing the book, the relief of finishing it, and her distaste for memoirs.
It took you almost fifteen years to publish this. Why so long?
As it was happening, I was making all these notes, and then I wrote 100 pages and gave it to somebody to read—a very close ally involved in my publishing life—who hated it. It just froze me. And then Granta came to me as I was finishing my last novel. They were doing this adoption anthology. And I said to myself, Come on, Homes, you’ve got to be able to pull something out of this. So I went back to [the notes] and I thought, They’re really not that bad.
Does this book help explain why you’ve written such dark stuff in the past?I think I’m compelled toward truth always. One of the things I’ve always done with my characters is make them have to face the truth of who they were even if it was excruciatingly painful to them, whether it’s the couple in Music for Torching or the reality of who my family is.
Except in this case you’re making yourself suffer instead of your characters.
I suffer for my characters, too.
Do you feel better now?I spent a long time feeling like at any moment I just would be not part of the planet anymore. I do feel better now. But people keep saying, “It must have been so cathartic for you.” And I think, Is vomiting cathartic?
I think it usually is.
I don’t. I have a fear of vomiting. I equate it with death.
Are you dreading the reviews, especially after your last novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, got such a mixed reception?
I think getting slammed in the New York Times two weeks before the publication date, which actually gave critics around the country a chance to crib from that review, had a lot to do with the “mixed” reception. It wasn’t entirely mixed, it’s just the mixed part was very loud. I think about reviews of the memoir: What’s a negative review of a memoir? “Not only is she a lousy writer, her life sucks.”
I assume you haven’t heard from your birth father about the book.
I haven’t, no. I didn’t write it to get a response from him, that’s for sure. But my [adoptive] mother has read this twice, and she keeps saying to me, “It’s the best thing you’ve written.” Which to me as a novelist, who just works so hard on these books, is ironic.
How do you feel about memoirs in general?I’m completely opposed to them. People say, “Aren’t you young to have written a memoir?” And I say, “Well, I only remembered one thing.” As much as you’re talking about an experience in your life, I don’t think it means you’re going to talk about every experience of your life. And in a way it’s a memoir, and yet it’s about two people I never knew, and it’s about a life I never had, which I think is really interesting. It kind of becomes a Beckett thing.
You write that you have a family now, but don’t actually reveal very much about your current life, and people will no doubt wonder about it.
When I would write fiction, I would make up things, and people wondered. No matter what I do, it makes people wonder. I think that’s just my job.
How much did you wonder what it would have been like to grow up with your birth parents?
I don’t know that I would have survived growing up with my biological mother. She claimed my father wanted to adopt me, but I think it would have been like Cinderella, in that they’d never let me out of the kitchen.
Are you making an argument for nurture being more important than nature?
No, I feel like in many ways I really am an amalgam. I grew up in this very intellectual and artistic household that certainly allowed me to develop that side of myself, but I also think part of my drive, or how I move through the world, is definitely biological.
You were a writer for The L Word. Are you becoming a TV writer?I am creating a show for HBO. I can’t tell you [what it’s about]. But everyone writes a pilot for HBO. It’s the one way novelists get health insurance, okay?
NPR/All Things Considered
April 10, 2007
In her new memoir, A.M. Homes writes: "I grew up furious. I feared that there was something about me, some defect of birth that made me repulsive, unlovable."
Adopted as a newborn, Homes later learned the barest outlines of her birth — that she was the child of a young, single woman and her older, married lover.
When she was 31, Homes — now a fiction writer — learned that her biological mother was looking for her. She chronicles what unfolded after that in The Mistress's Daughter.
Homes talks to Melissa Block about her disappointments with her biological mother, who "lived in a fantasy world that was lost in time, that was about the moment she gave me up."
The author also describes the pain and bitterness she felt after meeting her charming and charismatic biological father — who asked her to take a DNA test and refused to include her in his family after promising to do so.
The Chicago Tribune
April 8, 2007
As a memoirist, A.M. Homes, whose often-shocking fictional tales from the underbelly of suburbia have brought her substantial literary cache, takes a characteristically fierce and fearless approach. And she has a whopper of a personal story to tell in "The Mistress's Daughter."
An adopted child, Homes was contacted by her biological mother for the first time in 1992, when Homes was 31. She discovers that her mother had become pregnant while having an affair with a married man, the owner of the dress shop in the Washington, D.C., area where she had worked since she was 15. Their child was one of 1 million or more babies given up at birth during a phase in American history when single mothers were shunned. Homes' birth mother never married, never had another child.
Homes already knew she had been adopted as a newborn, within months of the death of her adoptive mother's oldest son at age 9. She was raised with a brother whose birth had caused such complications that her mother could not have another baby. "I always felt that my role in the family was to heal things . . . to replace a dead boy," she writes. "I grew up doused in grief."
Meanwhile, she fantasized about her birth mother as "a goddess, the queen of queens, the CEO, the CFO, and the COO. Movie-star beautiful, incredibly competent. . . . She has made a fabulous life for herself, as ruler of the world, except for one missing link -- me."
This contact from her birth mother, Ellen Ballman, precipitates an identity crisis. As Homes eloquently puts it:
"The fragile, fragmented narrative, the thin line of story, the plot of my life, has been abr uptly recast. I am dealing with the divide between sociology and biology: the chemical necklace of DNA that wraps around the neck sometimes like a beautiful ornament -- our birthright, our history -- and other times like a choke chain."
After a few weeks, Homes calls Ballman for the first time. "Hers is the most frightening voice I've ever heard -- low, nasal, gravelly, vaguely animal." The phone call is "flirty as a first date" but leaves Homes uncomfortable. The next time she calls her, Ballman is angry. " 'You should adopt me -- and take care of me,' " she whines. Homes, understandably, is scared. "I am horrified at the way I see myself in her -- the loose screw is not entirely unfamiliar." She figures her biological father might have a similar reaction and writes him a letter introducing herself.
In the beginning, Homes withholds information from her mother: her last name, her address and phone number. Then Ballman leaves a message on her answering machine: " 'I know who you are. . . . I'm reading your books.' " This is birth mother as stalker, with menace in her voice. She is a nightmare, a character who would fit into one of Homes' novels.
Ballman appears at Homes' reading in a crowded bookstore in Washington in 1993, where her family and former classmates are present. Homes instinctively recognizes the stranger nervously twisting an umbrella. After all the books have been signed, Ballman approaches. " 'You're built just like your father,' " she says. Faced with two mothers in one room, Homes urges Ballman to leave. (Homes does not mention in her memoir the title of the book she was introducing that night. It was her third novel, "In a Country of Mothers," a psychological thriller about abandonment, guilt, mother love and obsession, in which a married therapist begins to believe her talented new patient, an adoptee, might be the daughter she gave up years before.)
Homes is not just any adopted daughter. She is a well-regarded novelist. It is tempting to wonder if her mother would have been so eager to track her down if this were not the case. As Homes puts it when her biological father responds to her first attempt to reach him only after a review of the new book has appeared in the newspapers, "If I'd been flipping burgers in a McDonald's instead of writing books, would I have ever heard from him?"
Homes meets the father at his attorney's office. She agrees to a DNA test, which proves she is his child. He promises to weave her into his family but meets her in clandestine places, treating her as if she were the mistress, not the mistress' daughter. He introduces her to his wife, who makes it clear she is not willing to have Homes introduced around Washington as his child. And that is the end of that.
In January 1994, Homes, who lives in New York, agrees to meet Ballman at the Oyster Bar at the Plaza Hotel. An unnamed friend waits nearby in support. Homes is barely ab le to breathe as she encounters this woman who seems from another era, with her rabbit fur coat and beehive hairdo. After devouring a lobster, Ballman asks for forgiveness for giving her away. " 'You absolutely did the right thing,' " Homes responds, and flees. There are further phone conversations in which Ballman makes wheedling demands, but Homes avoids meeting again.
In summer 1998, Ballman dies of kidney disease. Homes goes to the funeral. Accompanied by two unnamed friends, in a scene made powerful by understatement, she sorts through Ballman's home. This is the closest she will ever be to her mother. At one point she puts her hands into the pockets of Ballman's black jeans and discovers a wad of money, loose bills. "This is exactly the way I keep my money," she writes. She puts several boxes in storage and doesn't touch them again for years.
During the discovery part of the memoir, the push-pull of Homes' choices whether or not to follow through, to expl ore further, drives the story with great suspense. Ambivalence is at the core of these new, uninvited relationships. Homes' attempts to maintain her privacy, and her equally strong wish to be recognized by two people who it turns out are incapable of mirroring her, are poignant. Having been given up, then reclaimed, then asked to pony up a modicum of daughterly care, she withdraws.
Midway through her memoir, it seems Homes might have mined her story to its end, leaving only the tailings -- myriad odd findings like physical resemblances, habits in common. What is there to learn beyond her mother's death in 1998 and her father's ultimate rejection in the same year? (When she needs a copy of the DNA test to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, which he told her she was entitled to do, and which she hopes will give her further information about her ancestry, he refuses and denies that the test results exist.) She confines her story to its essence, offering relev ant scenes in a vacuum, avoiding reference to the people in her adult life other than a few unnamed friends. This heightens the sense of isolation.
What propels the book forward is a phase of intense, even obsessive genealogical research. Homes' "electronic dig" into her complex web of family history moves her story beyond the personal. In tracking her DNA, documents and family trees of biological and adoptive parents, she joins a community of researchers equally obsessed with excavating nature and nurture. Her perception of her situation shifts, her brilliant imagination takes fire, and she begins to engage with the broader realm of history.
She is "thrilled" to hear for the first time, at 44, her adoptive father's story of having as a boy seen 20,000 unemployed World War I veterans and their families march on Washington in 1932 demanding early payment of a cash bonus. "I feel as though I'm slowly reconstructing an ancient lost tapestry," she writes.
Sh e handles her biological father's serial rejection of her mother, of her and of her lawyer's attempts to reach him in a section that consists of one side of a "deposition" in which she frames all the damning questions she wants to pose. Finally, almost sweetly, she settles into a coda, a section called "My Grandmother's Table," in which she reconnects with her adoptive grandmother and meditates upon a future generation.
"The Mistress's Daughter" does not end like most of Homes' fictions. At the end of this book, a dark journey rife with betrayal and calumny, the heroine is, it seems, redeemed by love.
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Jane Ciabattari is the author of the short-story collection "Stealing the Fire," a member of the board of the National Book Critics Circle and a regular contributor to the board's blog, Critical Mass, at bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/.
San Francisco Chronicle
April 8, 2007
In 2004, A.M. Homes published a personal essay in the New Yorker about meeting her biological parents 12 years earlier, at 31. It was, in its way, as startling and riveting as her fiction. That is saying a lot. Homes' fearless, disturbing novels include "The End of Alice," about an imprisoned pedophile, and "Music for Torching," about a couple who burn down their house for the insurance.
"The Mistress's Daughter" encompasses her eponymous essay, significantly expanded. Although the core essay is the most powerful part of the book, curious readers will appreciate additional material that delves deeper into Homes' roots and the fallout from adoption in general. Her discomfort in writing an autobiography seeps through the later chapters; we feel her effort and teeth-clenched determination to complete this project.
In 2004, Homes protected her parents' identities with pseudonyms, although her biological mother had been dead for six years. The wraps are now off. Her birth mother was Ellen Ballman, who became pregnant at 22 after a seven-year affair with her married, older boss, Norman Hecht. He had been stringing her along with promises of marriage for years, but then dropped her completely. His wife gave birth to their third child shortly before Homes was born, in December 1961.
Homes captures the shock of meeting these intimate strangers for the first time. She describes the seismic jolt to her life in a novelist's terms: "The fragile, fragmented narrative, the thin line of the story, the plot of my life, has been abruptly recast." She adds, "There is a deep fracture in my thoughts, a refrain constantly echoing: I am not who I thought I was, and I have no idea who I am."
Ellen is a pathetic, needy woman whose development seems to have been arrested in late adolescence, searching for someone to mother her rather than the reverse. She stalks her long-lost daughter at book readings, whines on the phone, expects Valentine's Day gifts. Homes comments, "The more Ellen and I talk, the happier I am that she gave me up. I can't imagine having grown up with her. I would not have survived."
When Ellen dies of kidney disease at 60, Homes writes movingly of "the profound loss of a piece of myself that I never knew, a piece that I pushed away because it was so frightening."
The story of Homes' birth and private adoption is not unique. Tales such as hers have received lighter treatment in novels, including Elinor Lipman's "Then She Found Me." More significantly, Ann Fessler interviewed scores of Ellens for her recent gut-wrenching book, "The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade." One wishes Fessler's book had been available to Homes before she met her biological mother, as it might have given her a more sympathetic understanding of what Ellen endured at a time when single mothers were shamed into relinquishing their babies.
In searing prose, Homes addresses the powerlessness and deracination that are the general lot of those surrendered children: "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."
As the product of what she determines was "a sex life, not a relationship," Homes vents her anger at Norman, whose dark hair, dimples and body shape she inherited.
Norman pressures Homes to do a DNA test and refuses to give her a copy of the positive results when, after years of "electronic digs" researching her ancestry on the Internet, she decides to join the Daughters of the American Revolution as a way to claim her heritage.
Hell hath no fury like a daughter scorned and "denied my right to own my own identity." We can't help cheering as Homes fantasizes angry letters and a scathing deposition of this selfish, thoughtless man who wanted the evidence of his bad behavior to go away, and stay away. Furious and grief-stricken that he is subjecting her to the same dismissive brush-off he gave Ellen, Homes writes, "My mother had no life after she gave me up -- she never married, never had another family. She had invested in him from a very early age -- he used her and then said goodbye. She never recovered."
Woe unto shameful parents whose offspring grow up to become writers. Like Paula Fox's "Borrowed Finery," "The Mistress's Daughter" is a lacerating memoir in which the formerly powerless child triumphs with the help of a mighty pen.
And triumph Homes does. Not only does she have her successful literary career, but, as she indicates in her surprisingly sentimental coda, she also has her family: not just her adoptive brother and parents, but memories of her inspirational adoptive grandmother, plus her very own "biological echo" -- a daughter.
The Observer
June 3, 2007
Part-way through this book, AM Homes meets her double in the person of the man who fathered and abandoned her after a casual affair nearly half a century ago. He is pink-cheeked, white-haired and fancy-suited with thick legs and stubby hands like paws. 'He is my exact replica, the male version of me.'
A few pages later, she comes across a newspaper photo of his daughter, her legitimate half-sister (who has no idea that Homes exists). 'I see her fat thighs, her belly, her feet, her outstretched hand and it is my thigh, my belly, my feet, my hand.' The sinister thing is that this woman is sitting in a local McDonald's with her small daughter got up in a Barbie outfit. Homes's best-known story, 'A Real Doll', is about a boy dating and eventually raping his sister's Barbie doll. 'I was being ironic; she is being serious.'
This confrontation between two sisters or, rather, the collision it represents between two fantasies - one profoundly ironic, the other just as profoundly serious - is the core of this book. The Mistress's Daughter is an account by a novelist famously hostile to autobiography of parallel encounters as an adult with her birth parents. 'It's a memoir ... about two people I never knew and it's about a life I never had,' she says. 'It kind of becomes a Beckett thing.'
Beckettian Barbies are the natural inhabitants of Homes's literary landscape. The three leading characters preparing to meet one another in her memoir all behave like teenagers on a first date. Homes and her birth mother Ellen initially make contact through phone calls ('they are seductive, addictive, punishing'). The pair exchange flowers, cuddly toys, notes, cards and confidences. The mother grows steadily more demanding. Plans for a trip to the zoo spiral into full-scale takeover. '"Why won't you see me?" she whines. "You should adopt me - and take care of me," she says.'
Parent and child swap roles. Ellen comes to meet her daughter wearing the fluffy fur bolero, slacks and high-piled hairdo of her Fifties generation. 'I suspect this is the way she must have dressed when she used to meet my father ... I feel suddenly defensive ... I sense I am not measuring up.'
Like her father before her, Homes backtracks for fear of being swallowed whole. 'After the millionth phone call, I ask Ellen to stop calling.' Homes meanwhile embarks on a separate liaison with her father, who is critical of his long-lost daughter's dress sense and all too clearly unimpressed by her professional career. She worries about her looks and what to wear for their secret assignations ('I want his approval').
They meet in cheap hotels where she imagines undressing for him and knows he is imagining it, too. Both have visions of her being accepted by his family, a daydream hastily abandoned after a single brief encounter with his wife.
Homes knows well enough that, rationally speaking, she would have been unlikely to survive with either parent ('The more Ellen and I talk, the happier I am that she gave me up'). But her imagination listens to the siren song of unreason. Stalked by her mother, she stalks her father, posting herself outside his house, picturing the life inside, pretending to be part of it. Dissatisfaction with her own adoptive parents - fond, anxious presences hovering on the outskirts of this story - comes to a crisis in a fearful passage when Homes parks her car on a Christmas visit home and sits brooding in the carport: 'I am in front of the house, the only house we ever lived in, in front of my family... I am so angry, so sad, hating everyone for who they are and for everything they are not. It is the rising of emotion, everything I can't articulate begins whirling inside me... I am gunning the engine, wishing I'd take my foot off the brake; the car is straining under my foot. The car... wants to go forward, to hurl itself blindly through the wall and into the kitchen. I picture the cabinets emptying out, dishes breaking, the engine punching through the back of the refrigerator, a headlight coming through the crisper door.'
It is the quintessential American dream with Homes at 32 playing the aggressive and destructive teenage dreamer. Her foothold on the volcanic shifting inner levels of reality was precarious from the start. In moods like this, it threatens to give way altogether. Anger spurts from terror. 'I grew up furious,' she writes at the beginning of her book and, near the end, after her birth mother's premature death and her father's final bleak rejection: 'What bubbles beneath is rage - nuclear-hot rage.'
The first half of this book is a startling, sometimes shocking voyage of discovery. In the second, Homes puts herself through what Germaine Greer, in an equally unforgiving memoir of her unsatisfactory father, calls the bureaucratic mincer. Archives are combed, libraries ransacked, the web comprehensively dug over. Bloodlines flow in from Russia, Europe, England and all over America. Family history becomes a painful and protracted process of resuscitation.
What is unexpected is the sheer violence of the operation. Piecing and holding together an identity turns into a bodily ordeal as drastic as fainting or spewing up. Homes is consumed by fear of invisibility, disintegration, obliteration. Chaos and confusion suck her under. At times, she can barely breathe; at others, her body chills and stiffens like a corpse. Chemicals flood her system. She feels herself evaporating, imploding, folding into nothingness 'like origami'.
The Mistress's Daughter turns truth into a fable for the 21st century in much the same way as Nabokov's Lolita did for the 20th or Baudelaire's vision of being haunted by his double for the 19th. It thrives on the tangled roots of fact and fiction. It articulates and makes a kind of poetry out of a mundane predicament central to our fluid, fissile, fractured world: 'I am the product of a sex life, not a relationship.'
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
The Washington Post
April 16, 2007
A.M. Homes is one of the last writers you'd expect to come out with a memoir. She doesn't even like to reveal herself in fiction.
Like all novelists, Homes, 45, has had to draw a personal boundary line between the imagined and the real. The Chevy Chase native may have just published a nonfiction book, "The Mistress's Daughter," but she has long favored the invented over the adapted.
She takes "absolute pleasure in inventing things," she says. "I don't by nature write autobiographically."
Are there reasons that Homes -- whose novels and stories have been both widely praised and frequently labeled "disturbing" -- chose to imagine the lives of a murderous pedophile, a suburban couple who torch their own house or a boy who conducts a violent, erotic relationship with his sister's Barbie?
Perhaps.
Are these characters in any direct way autobiographical?
They are not.
There has been, however, one notable exception. Homes's 1993 novel, "In a Country of Mothers," is an intense exploration of the psychology of adoption. Adopted herself as an infant, Homes drew themes and details straight from her own experience. They ranged from the wording of the coded message her adopted character's soon-to-be parents receive when she is born ("Your package is here and it's wrapped in pink ribbons") to that same character's ambivalent answer, decades later, to the question, "Would you want to know who your mother was?"
"I'd take the information," she replies, "but I don't know what I'd do with it. It might mess me up."
In December 1992 -- with "In a Country of Mothers" written, edited and moving toward publication -- life veered crazily toward art. Homes's birth mother contacted the lawyer who'd arranged the adoption 31 years before. "She'd be willing to hear from you" was the message.
Homes took the information.
It messed her up.
There were some letters, delivered through a third party, and, finally, a phone call, initiated by Homes. The voice on the line frightened her. It was "low, nasal, gravelly, vaguely animal."
"Tell me about you -- who are you?" the voice asked.
Homes said only that she was a writer, lived in New York, had a dog. "I am not who I thought I was," she found herself thinking, "and I have no idea who I am."
More stressful conversations followed. One day, the voice showed up on her answering machine.
"Your cover is blown," it informed her. "I know who you are and I know where you live. I'm reading your books."
Two Shadows
Homes strides into the West Village restaurant a couple of minutes late -- a bit rumpled, looking warmer and more natural than she does in her carefully posed book jacket photo -- and extends a hand:
"Are you you?"
It's her standard way of greeting an interviewer she's never met. But one can't help thinking it's also a version of the question Homes has spent a lifetime asking herself.
Are you you? And just who would that "you" be, anyway?
Growing up, Amy Homes was the kind of girl who loved the slides and swings at Candy Cane City, the Rock Creek Park playground near her house, and shot hoops in neighbors' driveways, pretending to be a Harlem Globetrotter. She also haunted the Chevy Chase library. She favored biographies and latched onto two famous figures in particular: Eleanor Roosevelt and Babe Ruth. Later she realized that both had been separated from their parents at an early age.
Two shadows darkened her childhood, she says.
One came from her adoption, about which she never quite got the full story. (At first, she was told it had been arranged, not privately but through the Jewish Social Service Agency.) The second was cast by the 9-year-old boy who would have been her brother if he hadn't died, from kidney disease, six months before she was adopted.
She couldn't help seeing herself as an outsider who could never fill the lost boy's empty shoes. She felt "that something huge had happened before I got there and that everybody was forever in the process of recovering from it and not particularly talking about it."
She and her surviving older brother took to playing funeral parlor, sprinkling the designated corpse with talcum powder. She found herself drawn to spend hours a day with a neighbor whose husband had just died.
As Homes got older, she discovered rock-and-roll. "I wanted to be in the Rolling Stones," she says, laughing, but rock was too high-risk and exposed, especially for young women in those days. Writing was a better fit.
It's "a very good way for a shy person to reach out to other people, because you don't have to do it in person," she explains.
When she was 19, a play she'd written won a competition that led to a production in Washington. That same year she wrote her first novel, "Jack," narrated by a boy who learns that his father is gay. It would be published in 1989 and would be followed, in 1990, by a much lauded collection of stories, "The Safety of Objects."
She published under the initials "A.M.," which she'd used on her school papers for years. "I thought: I like the space between A.M. Homes and who I am," she says. Interviewers would try to intrude, but it seemed important not to let that space disappear.
Ever since "Jack," people have been asking Homes if she is gay. "And I would say, 'I've dated men and I've dated women and there's no more or less to it than that,' " she says. "I mean, there really isn't!" For that matter, Homes asks why it is that when journalists interview a female writer, as she recalls poet Sharon Olds pointing out, "they ask either what she's cooking for dinner or all about her family."
Fair enough. Yet this line of argument raises an obvious question: How did the woman who says, convincingly, that "I am, and apparently always have been, this very private person" come to write something as personal and revealing as "The Mistress's Daughter"?
The simple answer: What happened when her birth parents showed up felt so surreal that, to make sense of the experience, she had to start taking notes.
"I felt like I needed a larger hard drive in my head," she says. "Because the hard drive that we have has two slots. It has a mother and a father slot. It doesn't have slots for extras."
'You Should Adopt Me'
"In my dreams, my birth mother is a goddess, the queen of queens," Homes writes. "Movie-star beautiful, incredibly competent, she can take care of anyone and anything."
In real life, sadly, Ellen Ballman couldn't even take care of herself.
The woman who'd put that pink-ribboned package up for adoption in 1961 turned out to have led a life that Homes shorthands as "really awful." Never married, financially and emotionally insecure, she had a neurotic neediness that reminded Homes of the Tennessee Williams character Blanche DuBois, "moving from person to person, desperate to get something, to find relief from unrelievable pain."
Head crammed with images of a fantasy being whom she had mythologized for decades, Ellen couldn't relate to the actual daughter she'd tracked down.
"You take better care of your dog than you take of me," she told her newly rediscovered offspring when Homes, wary and disoriented, wouldn't agree to an immediate meeting. "You should adopt me -- and take care of me."
Homes didn't know how to respond.
When they did meet, Ellen asked her forgiveness for letting her go.
"I forgive you. You absolutely did the right thing," Homes replied. But Ellen still frightened her. The disconnect was so great, she sensed, that she would never see this mother again.
That didn't mean she couldn't muster sympathy from a distance -- or that she wouldn't feel tremendous guilt when Ellen died, alone, in 1998.
Her birth father turned out to be unrelated to fairy-tale royalty either.
Ellen told Homes that she'd gone to work for Norman Hecht at a store called the Princess Shop, in downtown Washington, when she was 15 years old. The boss, who was married and in his 30s, took to driving her home, then out to dinner. Within a couple of years, she said, Norman was promising to get a divorce and marry her.
Didn't happen.
Homes wanted to meet him anyway. They met in his lawyer's office, where they talked about Ellen, among other things. "She was a slut who knew more than her years -- things a young girl shouldn't know," Norman said.
The Ellen-and-Norman story that Homes pieced together was filled with melodrama and pathos, and she ended up parsing competing versions. For example: Norman and his wife wanted to adopt her, he said, but Ellen nixed the idea. No way, said Ellen angrily: "He never even suggested it."
They agreed on one thing, at least. She told him she was pregnant on the day his mother died.
Norman asked Homes to take a DNA test -- it was his wife's idea, he said -- before he introduced her to her four half siblings. She showed up wearing linen pants and a blouse. When the test was finished, he said, "I would have liked to take you for a nice lunch if you'd worn something better."
Things went downhill from there, though it took a while. He told her the DNA test showed a 99.9 percent chance that he was her father. He introduced her to one of his sons, Norman Hecht Jr., but not to his other children. He arranged for her to meet his wife -- who, not surprisingly, didn't take much of a shine to the mistress's daughter. Eventually, though no one was suing anyone, he and Homes started communicating through lawyers.
After Ellen died, Homes went through her apartment and packed up four boxes of documents. She couldn't bear to go through them, so she marked them "Dead Ellen 1-4" and put them in a storage unit. When she finally opened them, they proved to contain more questions than answers.
Are you you?
Trying to fill out a dead-ended story, Homes found herself tracing her newly discovered ancestors in archives and through the Internet. Otherwise favorable reviews have suggested strongly that her chapter on Googling up a family portrait might be of less interest to readers than to the obsessed author.
As she wrote, she found herself employing a couple of fictional devices, which she was careful to label as such.
In a section called "Imagining My Mother," she tried to fill the gaps left by Ellen's death and by the fact that she'd never been "a very good reporter of her own life" anyway. As for Norman's side of the narrative, Homes constructed an angry, imaginary deposition filled with questions she'd like her birth father to answer. She called it "Like an Episode of 'L.A. Law.' "
Would you describe yourself as a family man? . . .
When your sexual relationship with Ms. Ballman began, how old was she? . . .
Did you have Ms. Ballman meet with you and your lawyer and together discuss the fact that "there are only so many slices of the pie"?
"I'm sorry, but he's not available," says a woman who answers the phone at Norman Hecht's current residence in the Washington suburbs, making it clear that he never will be and hanging up without identifying herself.
"Two words: No comment," says Norman Hecht Jr., also reached by phone. Asked if that is his father's policy as well, he adds: "He's 82, he has Alzheimer's. He's out of that game, okay?"
Suffice it to say that in the end, nobody involved came close to getting what they wanted from this reunion of parents and child.
Nature and Nurture
And yet: While Homes didn't get what she wanted, she just may have gotten some of what she needs.
For one thing, she has a new perspective on the parents she grew up with. "Tell me about your people," Norman asked her at one point. "My people are lovely," she shot back. "You couldn't ask for better."
Their connection has never been that simple, of course. When it is suggested to Phyllis Homes that being the parent of a writer isn't always easy, she bursts out laughing, then agrees. But of her daughter's new book she says, "I love it. I think it's the best thing she's written so far," and of the daughter herself, "We are terrifically proud of her."
For another thing, Homes has gotten more comfortable with her existential status as an unusually complex amalgam of nature and nurture. Her mental hard drive has in fact expanded, allowing her "to tolerate simultaneously a lot of contradictions and just accept that yes, it's contradictory."
The last chapter of "The Mistress's Daughter" attempts to acknowledge and resolve some of those contradictions. It does so by paying tribute to two of the people who've been at the center of her amalgamated life.
The first is a beloved grandmother from the family that adopted her. The second is her 4-year-old daughter, Juliet, conceived after her grandmother's death in part because "my family was shrinking and I thought: I don't want to be the only one left here."
Juliet, as Homes points out, is the only biological relative with whom she has ever lived.
This could be a subject for a whole other memoir, if it weren't for the obvious privacy concerns. But never mind that. She's a fiction writer! She can't wait to get back to inventing unreal worlds.
"This reality thing is painful and overrated," she says.
KQED-FM / Forum with Michael Krasny
April 7, 2007
The program talks with author A.M. Homes about her latest novel, which explores the nature of adoption and the emotional search for identity and family. Homes' most recent book is "The Mistress's Daughter."
Macleans / Canada
April 9, 2007
Novelist A.M. Homes was adopted at birth. As she recounts in her memoir The Mistress's Daughter, her 22-year-old birth mother had been having an affair with her much older, married boss for five years. In 1992, when Homes was 31, her biological mother sought her out, and in short order put her in touch with her birth father.
From Oprah and Maury and other talk-show hosts, we have a kind of cheesy picture of what reunions with birth parents look like. What was it actually like for you?
It's interesting, because both Oprah and Maury Povich were what prompted my birth mother to find me, she cited them as examples of what gave her the courage. That said, my first experience of meeting her was when she stalked me to a reading I was giving -- so, a slightly different experience from those talk shows! The television version of a reunion isn't just the idealized version, it's also the very condensed one where people are on their best behaviour. I think that's very different from how people really are or how the thing plays out over time. My birth mother was somebody who was incredibly needy, and came to find me to meet her own needs. I think other times birth parents come back to say, "I'm here if you want to talk, but if you don't, that's okay." They offer themselves to the child, they don't hurl themselves.
She comes off in your book as a girl who never really grew up, whose kittenish qualities did not age well. Were you embarrassed by her?
I was overwhelmed by her. It was too awful to even be embarrassed by, honestly.
When she was stalking you, phoning constantly, your instinct was to turn away, but after she died you began almost compulsively digging up genealogical clues to her past and your genetic history. If she were still alive, what would you want to ask her?
Everything. Like a detective does on CSI, I would ask her the same questions over and over again, because I would be interested both in how the story shifts as she retells it, but also how it stays the same. I would ask her about her family, her past, her father, how she felt about herself and her life. The difficulty being, of course, she wasn't really equipped to answer those questions, I'm not sure what kind of development was missing. She thought she was sophisticated, in a kind of Frank Sinatra, going-to-a-show-in-Las-Vegas way. But she wasn't at all emotionally sophisticated.
Your birth father, who's still married to the same woman and has a family of his own, insisted you take a DNA test to confirm paternity, though it was never really in any doubt. What did your own parents think?
They were horrified. The whole thing upset them. On the one hand I think they felt somewhat threatened that my biological parents would somehow return and claim me, and they would lose me in some way. I also think they were really worried that I'd be hurt, either disappointed or emotionally upset, and obviously I was.
One of the most striking aspects of your fiction is that you make bad characters, or characters who do bad things, likeable. Yet there's nothing likeable about your biological father, at least as you portray him. He just seems like a beefy coward, a phony.
I wanted to like him. I liked how he tried to be charming and affable. But that outward display and persona completely contradicted his actual behaviour. I think what unfortunately is going to be seen in the next few weeks as the book comes out is that various magazines and newspapers have contacted him, and you'll see more of it, his behaviour is completely in character.
You write about feeling like an embarrassment, like somebody's dirty secret. It must feel strange, and unjust, given that you're actually a respected writer.
Yes. That part is incredibly painful to me. In a letter to my biological father a long time ago I said that I had worked very, very hard to make a good life for myself, to be a person that anybody's parents would be proud to have as a child. And instead, I have somebody who's essentially embarrassed about my existence, whose wife says, "Oh, your father would like to introduce you to people but that's not possible."
Why did you name him in the book?
I felt, doing all the genealogical research, it would seem very odd to go back through time and change generations of people's names. And it felt in some way as though I'd be changing history, and colluding with some secret, and it was just disingenuous given my whole enterprise. Does it worry me? Sure. I'm human. I didn't want it in any way to be hurtful for [his family], but I did want to tell my story.
Why, given everything your birth father revealed about his true character, did his second rejection, his failure to deliver on promises to introduce you to your half-siblings and even to provide you a copy of the DNA results, hurt so much?
I just really would've hoped he would behave differently. I tend to be a person who's in a funny way almost naive, who expects the best, or at least the better, of people. Thank God, because I think it would in some ways be very difficult otherwise. Last year, when my novel This Book Will Save Your Life was coming out, the New York Times was reviewing it two weeks early, and some naive part of my brain thought, "Wow, they must really like it!" But of course, Michiko Kakutani slammed me, two weeks ahead of publication, so every paper that hadn't written its review yet picked up hers and cribbed from it. This year the Times asks for a childhood photo of me, I guess for the review of this book, also early, and again my first response was, "Oh, they must really like it!" I'm like Sally Fields. With Alzheimer's.
When you were growing up, how much did you think about being adopted?
In some ways I thought about it a lot. I definitely felt rejected, I felt that I had been given away. And I didn't have the vocabulary to express that, or any way of understanding how that might affect me. So as a child I didn't think, "Oh, this affects my ability to make attachments with other people," or, "This affects how I view myself." Even when I went to talk to counsellors about it, they would say, "How do you feel about being adopted?" And I'd say, "Fine." Because that wasn't really the right question. One of the things that's so interesting in the evolution of how we talk about adoption is realizing that it's not a one-time event, it's an ongoing process in a person's life.
Now there are so many books about discussing adoption with your child -- I'm an adoptive parent, I've read them all. But on some level they're not helpful.
Exactly. We had this two-book grey set, The Adopted Family, there was a volume for the parents and a volume for the child. I remember not really understanding the book but knowing it was somehow important; that's how a child processes it. I always knew I was adopted, and I knew other kids who were adopted, but I didn't have any sense of what that might mean, or how it might affect me, except for feeling angry. When I was very upset I would say, "I want my real mother." My mom would say, "I am your real mother." Which was true. Now, as a parent, I think, oh my God, that would hurt so much if my daughter said that to me. I wasn't saying it to be hurtful, but there was some longing for something other than what I was getting. That said, after I met my biological mother, I never had that feeling again! I don't know if what I really was craving was some mythological thing that never could have existed, some goddess mother who was just so perfect and knowing and different.
You must have been an extraordinarily self-possessed kid. I read somewhere that at the age of nine you wrote to director John Sayles and he became your pen pal.
I think it was some need and desire to make contact with the outside world. I wrote to lots of famous people, but it wasn't really about their fame -- it just didn't seem prudent to be writing to random people in the phone book, you don't know who you're going to get. I was interested in their work, actually. John Sayles would write to me about his films and his writing, and Pete Townshend from the Who would write to me about the records he was making, and I would talk about what I was doing in school, and how my day had gone, and who was mean to me or not.
If one or both of your birth parents had raised you, do you think you'd have become a writer?
If I'd grown up with my birth mother, I'm not sure I would've survived. She was so ill-equipped that I don't know how she would've raised a child, and her mother made her take the bus home from the hospital after giving birth, she didn't even go pick her up, so there wasn't a lot of support. If I'd grown up with my father, the best-case scenario I could imagine is some really bad version of Cinderella. Would I be a writer? I don't know if they would have let me out of the kitchen! I feel that I am an amalgam of all four of my parents, and without all of them I wouldn't be who I am.
You've said writing a memoir was not cathartic. But at least in the book, you do end up somewhere different than where you began.
I'm 10 years older, that's one of the reasons. Getting older, you don't feel as fragile, and I've had the good fortune to have a substantial career. I no longer feel that at any moment someone's going to say that I don't belong here. That's a big change, I really felt when I was younger that at any moment I could get kicked off the planet. The concept of being illegitimate isn't the same anymore, but I grew up always feeling on the outside. It was excruciatingly painful to turn my eye on myself and my experience and really take it apart in the way I do with any other story. One of the things that compelled me to finish is that I thought perhaps it would open up the conversation in different ways. In adoption literature, people always write with an agenda. I feel it's a complex thing for everybody, there is no right or wrong point of view, no right or wrong experience. I also wanted just to open up the question of identity in a larger sense. I don't think people who are adopted have a unique identity crisis, I think it's sort of like the electron microscope version of an identity crisis, which just means it's the same questions all people ask -- who am I? where did I come from? -- but it's a larger, almost exponential frame.
There's a new orthodoxy about adoption, that openness is the better way.It's an interesting thing that all of adoption law really protects everybody but the child. I do believe that even when you have a child and give it up, it does not mean that you give up all responsibility. It means that you say that you're not equipped or able to raise this child, but you still have an obligation to answer some questions at some point.
Atlanta Journal Constitution
April 3, 2007
Back
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Verdict: A jagged, searching story.
It used to be that American novelists wrote about society or the so-called Great American Dream. In the late 20th century, though, family became the most popular, overarching focus of this country's fiction. And no one has carried us into the 21st century quite like A.M. Homes.
Book by book, Homes has expanded our notion of the family's boundary altogether. In her 1989 debut, "Jack," a teenager struggling to grow up learns his father is gay. In her second novel, "In a Country of Mothers" (1993), a therapist begins to think her patient is the long-lost daughter she gave up for adoption.
When that novel was published, Homes deflected questions about its autobiographical roots. But as she reveals in "The Mistress's Daughter," readers' hunches were correct. An adopted child, Homes never knew the true nature of her roots —- until they came back to confront her face to face.
Almost 15 years ago —- when Homes was 31 —- her birth mother tracked her down and made it known, through the lawyer who handled Homes' off-the-books adoption, "that if you wanted to contact her, she'd be willing to hear from you."
As Homes writes, the sting of this passive-aggressive approach soon bled into curiosity. She recalls fantasizing that her mother was a glamour puss diva, a free spirit. "I pictured Audrey Hepburn," she writes.
Actually, Homes' birth mother was a heavily medicated neurotic with a lifetime of regret. "I have never married," she writes to Homes in letters, and "I have always felt guilty about giving this little girl away."
Homes was the offspring of her mother's affair with a married man. Getting any details was not easy. Homes hired a private investigator and then became an amateur detective herself, phoning old friends and acquaintances of her birth mother. She tracked down her father and found him a big, bluff blowhard with a weird penchant for meeting his long-lost daughter in hotel rooms —- as if they were having an affair.
As in Daniel Mendelsohn's recent memoir, "The Lost," here is a family drama as a kind of emotional detective story. The first half of "The Mistress's Daughter," much of which appeared in The New Yorker, unfolds speedily, in briskly paced scenes.
The second half confronts how this information changed Homes' sense of herself, a more complicated and fraught story.
As a novelist, Homes is a connoisseur of narratives, but as an individual she has never felt she possessed one of her own. And so, naturally the first thing Homes did was try to graft her life story onto that of her parents' narratives.
When that didn't work, she began researching the lives of her maternal and paternal grandparents. When their stories were vague or unsatisfactory, Homes looked to other, newly discovered blood relatives for clues about who she is, where she comes from.
Homes dramatizes this search on the page by adopting a variety of styles and genre conventions. The book's opening section reads like noir, another chapter feels like fiction. One late tour-de-force chapter unfolds entirely as a series of questions addressed to her increasingly hard-to-reach biological father.
Readers who demand of their books a kind of stylistic unity will be jarred by "The Mistress's Daughter," with its frequent shifts in style and voice, its narrative pivots and redirections. But those who are willing to follow Homes will be amply rewarded.
This is a truthful, agonizing story of one woman's search for a narrative life raft. When it's stolen out from beneath her again —- as we know it will be —- Homes does what she has been doing all along as a novelist: She builds her own.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
A Q&A with A.M. Homes, author of The Mistress's Daughter
You are best known for writing fiction that takes risks—exploring the psychological worlds of your characters from the inside out; how was writing a memoir different from writing fiction?
The memoir was much more difficult. My greatest pleasure as a writer comes from inhabiting people whose experience is different from my own. In fiction one can travel the imagination, exploring the unknown, but in memoir—one essentially picks at a wound, again and again, revisiting the most painful complex moments of your life. Autobiography is limited where fiction is limitless and that’s why I love it. With this book I spent months, years really, trying to find language for what was the most ethereal and biological—almost chemical—emotional experience of my life to date—an experience that on many levels defies language. The degree of difficulty was very high…it was brutal, unbearable at times, which is why it took so long.
So why do it?
That’s a good question. Part of it was the challenge of giving voice to something so difficult to describe. As the events were unfolding it all seemed so horrifying that I was sure I would never forget–-sure that everything would remain perfectly etched in my memory—that every phone message and the sound of my biological mother’s voice would echo in my head forever. I also felt the need to capture the peculiarity of it all—to be able to show it to others, and ask what do you think—does this seem odd? The return of my biological family was traumatic—paralyzing—and I just wanted to capture the events without processing or analysis, to deliver the story back to myself, as though by writing it down, it would begin to make sense.
Did writing this bring closure or a sense of relief?
Not really. I don’t think there is such a thing as closure on this kind of subject matter—it’s on-going. I’m still adopted, there are still enormous things I don’t know about my own history. Writing this book was not cathartic—it was intense, it took more than 10 years as I struggled to figure out who I was in relation to where I had come from. That said; am I different or changed now that it is done—yes. No doubt there are subtle ways in which I feel stronger. Having survived the psychic annihilation of being willfully unknown by my biological family, the good news is I no longer question my right to be alive—I have earned a place here on earth.
When I started writing this book my motivation was to create a document for myself but at some point I started thinking about others who might also be fighting to feel like they have a right to be alive. My hope is that the book would have meaning for others. As much as I feel more exposed than I would with a novel, there is a kind of honesty to it—an inescapable clarity that just is. This is who I am; this is my life—45 years of sadness, joy, achievement and failure. It is really a book about a life lived and how we learn to accommodate our selves and our families.
The section of the memoir called My Father’s Ass—in which you write about going for a DNA blood test with your biological father—at the lab you see him walking away from you and you recognize his ass as your own. Is there an unavoidable legacy, a biological inheritance that one can’t escape?
Before I was “found” I had a rich fantasy life about who my parents were—there was enormous freedom in not knowing my background, a wonderful innocence. I could be anyone. As far as I was concerned, my parents were Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag. It made perfect sense—and still does—when one thinks about who one is informed by—Sontag and Kerouac were my chosen legacy. When I met my biological parents—I saw fragments of myself in them and was terrified—I wondered if I would keel over and die at a very young age as some of them did or would I have a mid-life crisis and ruin all that I’d built for myself as both biological parents did independent of each other. Would I be “crazy” like my mother and so on. For the first time, I could feel the thumb print of DNA on my body. Having never known anyone related to me, I had to be told by others that I looked like my biological parents. Having never seen myself before, I didn’t know what I looked like. No doubt there is biology that one can’t escape, but at the same time, one can also hope to develop and improve upon that biological root.
All of your work deals with identity in some form or another—characters struggling to reconcile the dissonance between their public and private lives. And this book too is not just about adoption but about universal questions; who am I, where did I come from, how do I describe myself. Can you talk a bit about your identity and how it’s changed over time?
My identity—that’s a good one. Woody Allen’s film Zelig, about the “human chameleon,” had enormous resonance for me—that feeling of almost unconsciously shifting to accommodate is something I relate to. I grew up with enormous unknowns—questions but no answers. On the positive side, the flux or fluidity of my identity has been helpful to me as a writer—allowing me to crawl inside the experience of others. People always ask how I’m able to write from a male point of view and for me it’s entirely natural to be someone other than myself. The two areas where I have a more fixed identity are as a writer and, more recently, as a mother, and even those have their moments of identity crisis. When I was pregnant, Philip Roth came up to me at the National Book Awards looked at my giant belly and said, “What did you go and do that for?” As though by becoming a mother, I’d given up my spot as a writer and/or by becoming a mother, I’d gone from being this mysterious ambisexual writer into being a girl. Whatever it was…it wasn’t a good thing. But if I was being honest, I would say that in many ways I am like a shape-shifter, reflecting what is already out there and yet I’m sure I must have an identity of my own. Let me keep looking, maybe I can find it around here somewhere.
One of the most fascinating chapters of this book is The Electronic Anthropologist—and your experience doing 21st century genealogical research—can you talk a bit about that?
I felt as though I’d stumbled down a wonderful rabbit hole—AKA the World Wide Web. I located an amazing amount of information, ranging from census documents, ship manifests, to people all over the world—each with information, resources that five years ago would have been impossible to identify and tap. What was so invigorating about this chapter was that, despite the hard time my immediate biological relatives gave me, this research allowed me to reclaim my enthusiasm about my own history. I was able to connect not just to my biological parents but to hundreds who had gone before me, and within that there was power, drama and narrative—thousand of stories to be told. My imagination began to expand and that allowed me to take back the experience as my own—having been paralyzed by the early part of the story. And I loved dipping into history—looking at dozens and dozens of birth certificates and death certificates and trying to sort out the “right” people from the wrong ones.
There are a lot of well known adopted people—ranging from Dave Thomas who founded Wendy’s to Steven Jobs who started Apple Computer and other writers—Edward Albee, Jeanette Winterson etc. Can you talk about how being adopted may have influenced your work?
Well, first off—if you’re going to have a club of famous adopted people you better do a bit more research, you’re leaving off the serial killer category—Son of Sam, Joel Rifkin, etc. There are whole web sites about adopted killers. But seriously I do think being adopted changes a person; it causes a dislocation, a kind of fracture that disrupts things.
In his books on becoming a writer John Gardner spoke about how all good writers have a chip on their shoulder or something they have get over. I’m not sure it’s a chip on my shoulder, having grown up feeling on the outside. I sure worked hard to be known, to deliver myself to a larger world in some way. No doubt my sense of being an “outsider,” more an observer than a participant, has informed my writing. I don’t think there’s a particular “adopted” point of view, but clearly my experience of feeling removed gives me a way of looking at the world that is perhaps different from others and a perspective from which to write. Also I tend to notice things that others don’t—emotional details. The combination of my constitution and my experience taught me very early on to clue into the emotional states of others.
If your biological parents hadn’t come looking for you, would you have looked for them? Are you sorry they found you?
No. I would not have looked for them. Someone once gave me a phone number for a woman who, for a fee, could reportedly find anyone in 24 hours—I carried that number with me for a long time and then curiously decided I wouldn’t call. And of course, it was just a few months later that my biological mother “found” me—which is somewhat unusual. It always seemed ironic—that only after I chose not to search did the information come to me. Am I sorry that they found me? As I say at the end of the book, “Did I choose to be found? No. Do I regret it? No. I couldn’t not know.”
