The Mistress's Daughter: A Memoir

#417
Title: The Mistress's Daughter: A Memoir
Author: A. M. Homes
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2007
251 pages

Aficionados of Homes's seductively creepy novels and short stories will enjoy her memoir, which is in many ways no less weird than her fiction. The first half describes how Homes, at that point an adult woman, learns that her birth mother wants to be in touch. Homes's part of the back story, and her speculations, hopes, and fears about this unknown mother who asserts her motherness, will be familiar to those who have gone through this experience themselves (and to their friends, who have heard these anxious concerns before). The uncovering of just who these biological parents were and what they are now to the author is riveting.

The drive to know, plus the drive to buffer the experience and any potential commitment, explains the second half of the book. Critics have found this section less engaging, but I enjoyed it more, because here we see Homes at work, sleuthing and poking and fantasizing. She portrays herself as both obsessed and resistant, creating a parallel experience for the reader. We see the psyche from whom her strange, compelling fictional characters arise, the bizarre tangents that are their genesis. We see her enter into a world of genealogical and internet research and expose both the voyeurism and frustrations that any amateur genealogist has encountered. We ultimately encounter the insoluble riddle: Who am I if other people control the proof of my identity.

This memoir makes me want to re-read all the Homes I have, and go find even more.