Synopses & Reviews
An acclaimed novelist's riveting memoir about what it means to be adopted and how all of us construct our sense of self and family.
Before A.M. Homes was born, she was put up for adoption. Her birth mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with children of his own. The Mistress's Daughter is the story of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her.
Homes, renowned for the psychological accuracy and emotional intensity of her storytelling, tells how her birth parents initially made contact with her and what happened afterward (her mother stalked her and appeared unannounced at a reading) and what she was able to reconstruct about the story of their lives and their families. Her birth mother, a complex and lonely woman, never married or had another child, and died of kidney failure in 1998; her birth father, who initially made overtures about inviting her into his family, never did.
Then the story jumps forward several years to when Homes opens the boxes of her mother's memorabilia. She had hoped to find her mother in those boxes, to know her secrets, but no relief came. She became increasingly obsessed with finding out as much as she could about all four parents and their families, hiring researchers and spending hours poring through newspaper morgues, municipal archives and genealogical Web sites. This brave, daring, and funny book is a story about what it means to be adopted, but it is also about identity and how all of us define our sense of self and family.
Review
"A can't-put-it-down memoir as remarkable for its crystalline prose, flinty wit, and agile candor as for its arresting revelations." Donna Seaman, Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"The Mistress's Daughter has the beguiling pull of mystery, memory, and surprise. I fell in love with it from the first page and read compulsively to the end. 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? As A.M. Homes shows, there are no definitive answers, but in our search for them, we find more important truths." Amy Tan
Review
"Both a heartbreak and a thrill to read, The Mistress's Daughter is a radiantly smart memoir of pain and self discovery, outlined in savage, very strange detail. A.M. Homes is a writer of extraordinary depth and courage and grace. Her story will knock you down and pick you back up again." Sean Wilsey
Review
"To my generation of writers, Homes is a kind of hero, and The Mistress's Daughter is the latest example of her fearlessness and brilliance. It is a compelling, devastating, and furiously good book written with an honesty that few of us would risk." Zadie Smith
Review
"[An] unsatisfying and depressing story [that] proves to be of far more interest to the principals involved than to the reader. Ultimately off-putting and unappealing, due to a whiny, self-pitying attitude conveyed in overwrought prose." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Homes draws you in from the first sentence and holds your interest throughout....By the end, you'll feel glad that nurture rather than nature has been dominant in her upbringing. Highly recommended." Library Journal
Review
"What propels the book forward is a phase of intense, even obsessive genealogical research....Her perception of her situation shifts, her brilliant imagination takes fire, and she begins to engage with the broader realm of history." Chicago Tribune
Review
"[I]f The Mistress's Daughter is not entirely satisfying, if it loses some of its furious precision...as a document of a flawed, incoherent self, it remains fierce and eloquent. And even some of its messier sections are gripping." Katie Roiphe, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"[A] taut, mesmerizing book that relies on both Homes' brutal honesty and her tendency toward high drama....The Mistress's Daughter...succeeds because of the writer's intimacy with her material, but also suffers from it." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Review
"Homes makes too much fuss about the adoption thing. Certainly being adopted can lead to anxiety and feelings of uncertain identity....The problem is that Homes seems to think that this has never happened to anyone else." Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review
"[T]hough the wary tone serves the presentation of the book's first half, it undermines the second....[H]ere the reader's imagination doesn't have enough context to work with. Except for the story of Homes and her four parents, the world is absent." Sven Birkerts, The Los Angeles Times
Synopsis
The "fierce and eloquent" (New York Times) memoir by the award-winning author of May We Be Forgiven and This Book Will Save Your Life 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.
"A compelling, devastating, and furiously good book written with an honesty few of us would risk." --Zadie Smith
"I fell in love with it from the first page and read compulsively to the end." --Amy Tan
Synopsis
The fierce and eloquent (New York Times) memoir from A.M Homes, award-winning author of May We Be Forgiven and the forthcoming novel The Unfolding 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.
A compelling, devastating, and furiously good book written with an honesty few of us would risk. --Zadie Smith
I fell in love with it from the first page and read compulsively to the end. --Amy Tan
Synopsis
Before A. M. Homes was born, she was put up for adoption. The Mistress's Daughter is the story of what happened when, 30 years later, her birth parents came looking for her.
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
A. M. Homes is the author of several books of fiction. She has been awarded a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.