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The Mistress's Daughter
A. M. Homes
Viking
April 2007
On Sale: April 5, 2007
240 pages
ISBN: 0670038385
EAN: 9780670038381
Hardcover
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Fiction
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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