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The Mistress’s Daughter

John Freeman












The Mistress's Daughter

A.M. Homes


Viking, $24.95



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. In her 1989 debut, Jack, a teenager struggling to grow up suddenly learns his father is gay. In In a Country of Mothers (1993), a therapist begins to think her patient is the daughter she gave up for adoption.

At the time, Homes deflected questions about its autobiographical roots. But as she reveals in The Mistress's Daughter, her jagged, searching new memoir, reporters' 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, Homes' 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."

The sting of this passive-aggressive approach soon bled into curiosity. Homes recalls fantasizing that her mother was a glamour-puss diva, a free-spirit. "I pictured Audrey Hepburn," she writes.

Would that it had been true. Homes' birth mother was actually a heavily medicated neurotic with no respect for boundaries and a lifetime of regret. Homes was given up for adoption because she was the offspring of her mother's affair with a married man.

Getting these details is not easy. Homes hires a P.I., then becomes an amateur private dick herself. Her sleuthing gradually takes on an obsessive quality that reinforces how, no matter how much detail she possesses, her place is outside the family circle. She finds her father a big, bluff blow-hard with a weird penchant for meeting his long-lost daughter in hotel rooms—as if they were having an affair.

Here is the family drama as a kind of emotional detective story. The first half of The Mistress's Daughter unfolds speedily, in briskly paced scenes, Homes chasing after the ramifications of each new detail.

The book's 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. So 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 and other newly discovered blood relatives.

Homes dramatizes this search on the page by adopting a variety of styles and genre conventions. The book's opening section reads like a noir; another chapter feels like fiction. Readers who demand stylistic unity will be jarred by The Mistress's Daughter, with its frequent shifts in style and voice. But those willing to follow Homes will be amply rewarded. Here 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: makes her own.

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