I'm really surprised by how much I related to this memoir---like scarily so. I received this in a BookCrossing bookbox and dismissed it several times before deciding to give it a try. Weirdly, it was almost calling out to me to read it. I'm so glad I did---I devoured it in one afternoon. It didn't really solve or fix anything for me...just got me thinking and contemplating about my past and family stuff that I don't process through as much as I should.

Homes's memoir brings to mind so many thoughts on identity and the gut-born desire to be truly known. This passage resonated with me:

"I grew up convinced that every family was better than mine...I would hover on the edge, knowing that however much they include you--invite you to dinner, take you on family trips--you are never official, you are always the 'friend', the first one left behind."

That's exactly how I felt after my parents' divorce---the unwanted stepkid on both sides. Both parents tried to make me a part of their twisted new "family units" but I was already a part of only one family unit---the one they'd divided.

I was not adopted but I relate to so much of this story. We have in common the messed up desire to please lousy parents---to perform and hope they'll find us good enough to let into the selfish world they shut us out of. (My mom is a much different person now than she was in the years just after her divorce and she's an important part of my life now.) I don't often think back on the hard years but this story reminded me of that vulnerable girl who was looking to be loved and cared for by those who couldn't get past themselves to do it properly.

I thought of my dad when the author said after hearing her mother was sick, "I was so busy protecting myself from her that I didn't...(recognize) the trouble she was in." It's a messed up world when this is the relationship one has with her parent(s).

Cleaning up the home after her mother's death she says, "This is not how (she) would have wanted to have been presented---but this is who she is and what she left behind." This makes me think of my dad's mom who was estranged from us until the last few years of her life. This is how I felt after her death and I wondered if I was the only one in the whole world who even semi-mourned her. I mourned the "could have been" rather than the "was".

So there you go...a look into my guts. Probably won't see another one for awhile. Maybe I need to go back to the Aunt Dimitys... ( )

Who are we and where do we come from? It's a question in all our minds at some point or another, but for a child of adoptive parents it takes on a whole other definition. Most of us take for granted what others may not have - a personal history. We all have the collection of family stories, myths, folklore we grew up and let it fade into our memories.read more ( )

I expected to love this, and I did, kind of... but I had that vague deja vu feeling all through it, which turned out to be because I'd read most of it in the New Yorker. The rest was interesting - her research into her mother's life - but frustrating because it ended with things not really resolved (just like life, I guess.)

At the end she describes having a child, presumably without a partner. My biases are showing but it seemed astonishing that she'd do become a parent without involving the father, after feeling such a tie with her biological parents. I don't even know if the father isn't involved because she doesn't say, which also frustrated me. It would have been interesting to know her thoughts about that. ( )

I read The Mistress's Daughter by A. M. Homes because I am also writing a memoir about my absent father. Homes was the product of her very young mother's affair with a much older, married man. They gave her up for adoption at birth. When Homes is 31, her mother contacts her and Homes discovers both her parents. Her interactions with them, exciting at first, prove ultimately disappointing. I really enjoyed the parts where Homes imagines her mother's youth, the affair, the pregnancy. I felt that the part where Homes recounts her genealogical research into her parents' ancestors was quite boring at times: this person came to America, got married to X, had a child named Y, etc., etc. The most moving part was the list of questions that Homes wants to ask her father, but which he refuses to answer. A very interesting memoir. ( )

I registered this book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14080139

I seem to come upon these adoption stories a lot. This one is a memoir, unlike most of the others I have read.

A.M. Homes has written about adoption in her fiction. In this she lets us in on her own story. Adopted as a baby, she learns that her birth mother is interested in meeting her when she is 31 years old. She had not sought her out and wasn't even sure she wanted to meet her. After all, her mother gave her away.

More, she was always aware of her adoptive mother's fear that one day her daughter would be taken from her. She had lost a son and thus clung to her adopted daughter.

So A.M. decides to meet her biological mother. It isn't the meeting we see in movies or books. Her mother is excited to see her, yet appears not all that interested in who she is. When A.M. later meets her father he seems more interested in what she can do for him than what he can do for her.

After the initial curiosity wears off, A.M. is ready to go on with the life she had been living. Her bio mother isn't, however. She wants to see her all the time. She wants what A.M. cannot give, or does not want to.

It becomes strange, having two sets of parents. And it becomes difficult to work through the various internal conflicts. In fact, it took Homes quite a long time before she was ready to write about it.

I didn't love it. It's one more story that is helping me to understand the effects of adoption. It seems that many issues that come up are less likely to be problems when the adoption is open. Fortunately, that's the way of now. Admittedly, the mixed families that result can be odd, but the world is changing. It isn't all nuclear families now, and I'm not sure that ever was the best type family. ( )