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."