The Mistress's Daughter: A Memoir

The Mistress's Daughter: A Memoir
by A. M. Homes

The Mistress's Daughter: A Memoir
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Book Summary Information

Author: A. M. Homes
Edition: Hardcover
Published: 2007-04-05
ISBN: 0670038385
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Viking Adult

Book Reviews of The Mistress's Daughter: A Memoir

Book Review: Three Part Memoir
Summary: 3 Stars

Ms. Homes has done something extraordinary by offering up her personal experience as an adopted child, who is adored as the beloved daughter/sister/granddaughter in a Jewish intellectual family. The first portion of her memoir comes across as a tidal wave of sentiment and sucks the reader in immediately. Rarely has an adopted adult been so eloquent at describing the mental conundrum she faced with no biological connection to those she knew best. The book details how the appearance of biological parents in the life of this successful writer forever alters her life and likely, though she does not disclose much, the lives of her adopted family members. It is both illuminating and heartbreaking, the kind of information that should be mandatory reading for social workers whose work brings them into the lives of adopted or fostered children. The writing is fabulous here, you won't put this portion of the book down until you finish it.

The second part shares the research Ms. Homes plunged into to discover more about both her biological and adopted heritage. It is full of searches for ancestors and attempts to connect to unknown relatives who might or might not be able to offer more family history. This section of the book was written in a different tone, shared information on research, but was uninspiring. The third section was a sentimental journey connecting the reader to the good life the author created for herself.

Adoptees will appreciate the honesty of the author, but I suspect that adopting parents would wince at the overwhelming power of the-need-to-know that can haunt adopted children and resulted in what seems to be this painfully liberating memoir. I was left feeling sorry for the adopting parents who could only watch as their adult daughter struggled to negotiate the entanglements resulting from their wish to adopt a child.

Summary of The Mistress's Daughter: A Memoir

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.

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