The Mistress’s Daughter
$17.00
| Title | Range | Discount |
|---|---|---|
| Trade Discount | 5 + | 25% |
- Description
- Additional information
Description
The ”fierce and eloquent” (New York Times) memoir from A.M Homes, award-winning author of May We Be Forgiven and the forthcoming novel The Unfolding
The acclaimed writer A. M. Homes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with a family of his own. The Mistress’s Daughter is the ruthlessly honest account of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her. Homes relates how they initially made contact and what happened afterwards, and digs through the family history of both sets of her parents in a twenty-first-century electronic search for self. Daring, heartbreaking, and startlingly funny, Homes’s memoir is a brave and profoundly moving consideration of identity and family.
“A compelling, devastating, and furiously good book written with an honesty few of us would risk.” —Zadie Smith
“I fell in love with it from the first page and read compulsively to the end.” —Amy TanTHE MISTRESS’ DAUGHTER
“A compelling, devastating, and furiously good book written with an honesty few of us would risk.” –Zadie Smith
“Fierce and eloquent.” –The New York Times Book Review
“As startling and riveting as her fiction . . . a lacerating memoir in which the formerly powerless child triumphs with the help of a mighty pen.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Rich in humanity and humor . . . Homes combines an unfussy candor with a deliciously droll, quirky wit. . . . Her energy and urgency become infectious.” –USA Today
“I fell in love with it from the first page and read compulsively to the end.” –Amy Tan
“As a memoirist, A.M. Homes takes a characteristically fierce and fearless approach. And she has a whopper of a personal story to tell.” –Chicago Tribune
DAYS OF AWE
“A.M. Homes skillfully circles and tugs at the question of what it means to live in flawed, fragile, hungry human bodies . . . DAYS OF AWE is sliced through with Homes’s dark humor . . . one wants to read passages of a Homes story aloud because they are so fine . . . DAYS OF AWE feels like the part of the day when the sun is about to go down and the light is brighter while the shadows are darker. Everything has a sharp edge, is strikingly beautiful and suddenly also a little menacing.” —Ramona Ausubel, The New York Times Book Review
“Exuberantly transgressive.” —O, the Oprah Magazine
“[Homes] has shown a unique penchant for cracking open the dark heart of human nature — with irreverent wit, devastating empathy and haunting shocks . . . DAYS OF AWE [is] a memorable assortment of new tales about family, love, death, and an unqualified man who somehow stumbles into becoming a populist political candidate.” —Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon
“Homes’s keen ear for speech—surreal as her characters’ conversations often are—lends itself to varying degrees of self-aware misunderstanding, highlighting the complexity of language and the challenges . . . The impossibility of knowing another person completely is one of life’s painful truths, and [this] collection remind us of that—but [it] also shows that there are, at least, tools available to help us try.” —Vanity Fair
“Fascinating . . . I consumed these stories exactly like a spectator of a good fight or a neighbor peering through the hedge, and I felt sharply observed in turn. Homes, with her fierce sharp wit, reveals her characters’ deep flaws. No one gets away with anything and the spectacle is delightful.” —Molly Livingston, The Paris Review Daily
“With dark humor and sharp dialogue, Homes plumbs the depths of everyday American anxieties through stories about unexpected situations.” —Time
“In the title story, a Holocaust survivor taps into a theme of the collection when he describes the way people hold the history of previous generations inside them. ‘We carry it with us, not just in our grandmother’s silver,’ he says, ‘but in our bodies, the cells of our hearts.’” —Wall Street Journal
MAY WE BE FORGIVEN
Winner of the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction
“An entertaining, old-fashioned American story about second chances…A.M. Homes is a writer I’ll pretty much follow anywhere because she’s indeed so smart, it’s scary; yet she’s not without heart…May We Be Forgiven [is] deeply imbued with the kind of It’s A Wonderful Life-type belief in redemption that we Americans will always be suckers for, and rightly so.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
“Cheever country with a black comedy upgrade…Homes crams a tremendous amount of ambition into May We Be Forgiven, with its dark humor, its careening plot, its sex-strewn suburb and a massive cast of memorable characters…its riskiest content, however, is something different: sentiment. This is a Tin Man story, in which the zoned-out Harry slowly grows a heart.” —Carolyn Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times
“Darkly funny…the moments shared between this ad hoc family are the novel’s most endearing…Homes’ signature trait is a fearless inclination to torment her characters and render their failures, believing that the reader is sophisticated enough – and forgiving enough – to tag along.” —Katie Arnold-Ratliff, Time Magazine
“Homes, whose masterful handling of suburban dystopia merits her own adjective, may have just written her midcareer magnum opus with this portrait of a flawed Nixonian bent on some sort of emotional amnesty.” —Christopher Bollen, Interview
“At once tender and uproariously funny…one of the strangest, most miraculous journeys in recent fiction, not unlike a man swimming home to his lonely house, one swimming pool at a time: it is an act of desperation turned into one of grace.” —John Freeman, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A big American story with big American themes, the saga of the triumph of a new kind of self-invented nuclear family over cynicism, apathy, loneliness, greed, and technological tyranny…this novel has a strong moral core, neither didactic nor judgmental, that holds out the possibility of redemption through connection.” –Kate Christensen, Elle
“A.M. Homes has long been one of our most important and original writers of fiction. May We Be Forgiven is her most ambitious as well as her most accessible novel to date; sex and violence invade the routines of suburban domestic life in a way that reminded me of The World According to Garp, although in the end it’s a thoroughly original work of imagination.” –Jay McInerney, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Life
“I started this book in the A.M., finished in the P.M., and couldn’t sleep all night. Ms. Homes just gets better and better.” —Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends
“What if whoever wrote the story of Job had a sense of humor? Nixon is pondered. One character donates her organs. Another tries to grow a heart. A seductive minefield of a novel from A.M. Homes.” —John Sayles, author of A Moment in the Sun
“I started reading A.M. Homes twenty years ago. Wild and funny, questioning and true, she is a writer to go travelling with on the journey called life.” —Jeanette Winterson, New York Times bestselling author of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE
“Homes’ dark delivery . . . is in full regalia here. . . . Laugh-out loud funny.” –The Boston Globe
“An absolute masterpiece . . . Homes writes ecstatically, and like no one else.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer
“I think this brave story of a lost man’s reconnection with the world could become a generational touchstone, like Catch-22, The Monkey Wrench Gang, or The Catcher in the Rye. . . . And hey, maybe it will save somebody’s life.” –Stephen King
Hilarious . . . Homes writes in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and has the talent to pull it off.” –San Francisco Chronicle
IN A COUNTRY OF MOTHERS
“Homes…has the ability to scare you half to death….[She is] devastating…a very dangerous writer.” —Washington Post Book World
“A commanding narrative…by turns witty and unnerving, and at times almost unbearable in its emotional intensity.” —Wall Street Journal
“Intriguing…captures a world spinning out of control….Homes is at her best evoking the pathos and obsession at the center of relationships between therapist and patient, mother and child, husband and wife. She is also wickedly funny. [This is] a psychologically gripping story.” —San Francisco Chronicle
THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS
“Enthralling . . . full of subversive humor and truth . . . original and stiletto sharp.” —The Washington Post
“Wonderfully skewed stories . . . sharp, funny, and playful . . . Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting details right. A fully engaged imagination [is] at work—and play.” —Amy Hempel, The Los Angeles Times
“Alarmingly good . . . It is hard to say exactly who Homes’s predecessors are—Roald Dahl, Rachel Ingalls, and J.D. Salinger all come to mind—but in many ways she is not unlike Cheever.” —The Village Voice
“These stories are remarkable. They are awesomely well-written. In the sense of arousing fear and wonder in the reader they entertain, but what they principally bring us is a sense of recognition . . . Here are all the things that even today, even in our frank outspoken times, we don’t talk about. We think of them punishingly in sleepless nights.” —Ruth Rendell
“An unnerving glimpse through the windows of other people’s lives. A.M. Homes is a provocative and eloquent writer, and her vision of the way we live now is anything but safe.” —Meg Wolitzer
THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE
“Homes’ dark delivery . . . is in full regalia here. . . . Laugh-out loud funny.” –The Boston Globe
“An absolute masterpiece . . . Homes writes ecstatically, and like no one else.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer
“I think this brave story of a lost man’s reconnection with the world could become a generational touchstone, like Catch-22, The Monkey Wrench Gang, or The Catcher in the Rye. . . . And hey, maybe it will save somebody’s life.” –Stephen King
Hilarious . . . Homes writes in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and has the talent to pull it off.” –San Francisco Chronicle
JACK
“A moving novel, and a very refreshing one. Jack is such an engaging, attractive human being, it’s a pleasure to believe in him.” —David Foster Wallace
“The engaging, doggedly funny [Jack] is likable from the first paragraph, a good kid caught in circumstances too much for him. And in the particulars of those circumstances, A. M. Homes touches upon something unique. Ms. Homes handles the big subjects subtly, deftly and with an appealing lack of melodrama.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A. M. Homes has created a most endearing teenager, and an intensely real world around him …. A fine book.”—Hilma Wolitzer
THE UNFOLDING
Fortchoming September 2022
“From her first book onward, A.M. Homes has been challenging us to look at fiction, the world, and one other as we haven’t done—because we haven’t had the nerve, the eyes, the dire and dispassionate imagination. Gripping, sad, funny, by turns aching and antic and, as always, exceedingly well-observed and written, The Unfolding opens up another one of her jagged windows, at times indistinguishable from a crack, in the world that is always unfolding, and always vanishing, around us. “ – Michael Chabon, bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Moonglow and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
“A terrific black comedy, written almost entirely in pitch-perfect dialogue, that feels terrifying close to the unfunny truth.” – Salman Rushdie, New York Times bestselling author of The Golden House and Quichotte
“A dazzling portrait of a family—and a country—in flux. A story about what happens when truths that once seemed self-evident turn out to be neither self-evident nor even true. A.M. Homes has perfectly captured an America as it lurches toward freak-out, and a family as it shreds the lies it’s been living by. The Unfolding is hilarious and shocking and heartbreaking and just a little bit deranged—in other words, it’s a book that feels like what it feels like to be alive right now.” –Nathan Hill, author of The NixA.M. Homes was born in Washington D.C. graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa, lives in New York City and teaches at Princeton University. Her work appears in ArtForum, Granta, The Guardian, McSweeney’s, Modern Painters, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Electric Literature, Playboy, and Zoetrope. She works in television, most recently as as Co-Executive Producer of Falling Water and Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes, and is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. She is the recipient of awards including the Guggenheim, NEA, and NYFA fellowships. Her most recent novel, May We Be Forgiven, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2013, and has been optioned for film by Unanimous Entertainment.
INTRODUCTION
In her critically acclaimed novels and short stories, A.M. Homes has proved herself as one of this generation’s most fearless authors. Now, in her latest work, The Mistress’s Daughter, Homes moves from fiction to fact, shifting the focus to her own life and the families—biological and adoptive—who have shaped it. Applying the withering honesty and wicked wit for which she is known and celebrated, Homes tackles issues of identity and personal history from a fresh perspective, using her two sets of parents to illustrate the age-old debate of nature versus nurture.
A.M. Homes was put up for adoption before she was born. Thirty years later, she was contacted by her birth mother, and Homes’s childhood fantasies about who that woman might be were revived—only to be dashed by meeting her in person. Rather than the beautiful, capable goddess Homes had dreamed of, her mother proves to be a complicated, unsettling woman who demands too much, too soon; who fails to respect Homes’s personal boundaries; and who requires mothering rather than providing it. Homes’s biological father, meanwhile, treats his relationship with his daughter much like the illicit affair that created her, promising much but delivering little. Homes alternately pulls toward and away from her newfound parents, wanting something from this “new” family yet unsure exactly what and uncertain as to how it would fit with the family she calls her own. In this way, the author explores the confounding nature of heredity—as much as she feels alienated from her birth parents, she in equal measure recognizes herself in their tics, mannerisms, and physical characteristics. Ultimately, Homes moves beyond both her biological and adoptive parents, widening her net of family by looking back into her genealogical history and looking to the future in the form of her baby daughter. It is in this extended family picture that she finally finds her peace.
Central to The Mistress’s Daughter are themes of personal character, love, and forgiveness that extend beyond the events of adoption. Homes’s achievement is that she has taken her unique experience and made it universal. While fans of her fiction may be especially interested in catching a glimpse of the inner workings of the author’s psyche, those readers who are new to Homes’s work will be impressed by her bravery, her sharp humor, and her elegant prose. Her exploration of the point at which identity and ancestry both meet and diverge will ring true with anyone who has felt a disconnect between themselves and their family—which, plainly put, includes all of us.
ABOUT A.M. HOMES
A.M. Homes is the author of the novels, This Book Will Save Your Life, Music For Torching, The End of Alice,In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the short-story collections, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects, the travel memoir, Los Angeles: People, Places and The Castle on the Hill, and the artist’s book Appendix A:
In April of 2007 Viking will publish her long awaited memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter, the story of the author being “found” by her biological family, and a literary exploration and investigation of identity, adoption and genealogical ties that bind.
Her work has been translated into eighteen languages and appears frequently in Art Forum, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney’s,The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Zoetrope. She is a Contributing Editor to Vanity Fair, Bomb and Blind Spot.
She has been the recipient of numerous awards including Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, NYFA, and The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, along with the Benjamin Franklin Award, and the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis.
In addition she has been active on the Boards of Directors of Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center In Provincetown, The Writers Room, and PEN-where she chairs both the membership committee and the Writers Fund. Additionally she serves on the Presidents Council for Poets and Writers.
A.M. Homes was a writer/producer of the hit television show The L Word in 2004-2005 and wrote the adaptation of her first novel JACK, for Showtime. The film aired in 2004 and won an Emmy Award for Stockard Channing. Director Rose Troche’s film adaptation of The Safety of Objects was released in 2003, and Troche is currently developing In A Country of Mothers as well. Music For Torching is in development with director Steven Shainberg with a script by Buck Henry, and This Book Will Save Your Life is in Development with Stone Village Pictures.
Born in Washington D.C., she now lives in New York City.
A CONVERSATION WITH A.M. Homes
Q. To you, what are the most important and universal aspects of the story you are telling in this book? What do you want people to take away from it?
A. This is a book that explores coming to know one’s self. It’s about the very odd sensation of finding out that I was not who I thought I was, and yet didn’t know who I was. It wasn’t until my biological parents found me that I realized how much identity is really about narrative, the stories we are told about our family history. In The Mistress’s Daughter I explore the power of family narratives and go further, looking into how one does family research in the twenty-first century. The question “Who am I?” is not unique to the adoptee; it’s something we all wrestle with. My hope is that readers take from this book a deeper awareness of the adoption experience and that the story will prompt people to think about their own family narratives and their own identity.
Q.You are best known for writing fiction that takes risks—exploring the psychological worlds of your characters from the inside out; how was writing a memoir different from writing fiction?
A. The memoir was much more difficult. My greatest pleasure as a writer comes from inhabiting people whose experience is different from my own. In fiction one can travel the imagination, exploring the unknown, but in memoir, one essentially picks at a wound, again and again, revisiting the most painful complex moments of your life. Autobiography is limited where fiction is limitless and that’s why I love it. With this book I spent months, years really, trying to find language for what was the most ethereal and biological—almost chemical—emotional experience of my life to date, an experience that on many levels defies language. The degree of difficulty was very high . . . it was brutal, unbearable at times, which is why it took so long.
Q. So why do it?
A. That’s a good question. Part of it was the challenge of giving voice to something so difficult to describe. As the events were unfolding it all seemed so horrifying that I was sure I would never forget them, sure that everything would remain perfectly etched in my memory—that every phone message and the sound of my biological mother’s voice would echo in my head forever. I also felt the need to portray the peculiarity of it all—to be able to show it to others, and ask, “What do you think—does this seem odd?” The return of my biological family was traumatic—paralyzing—and I just wanted to capture the events without processing or analysis, to deliver the story back to myself, as though by writing it down, it would begin to make sense.
Q. Did writing this bring closure or a sense of relief?
A. Not really. I don’t think there is such a thing as closure on this kind of subject matter—it’s ongoing. I’m still adopted, there are still enormous things I don’t know about my own history. Writing this book was not cathartic—it was intense, it took more than ten years as I struggled to figure out who I was in relation to where I had come from. That said, am I different or changed now that it is done? Yes. No doubt there are subtle ways in which I feel stronger. Having survived the psychic annihilation of being willfully unknown by my biological family, the good news is I no longer question my right to be alive—I have earned a place here on earth.
When I started writing this book my motivation was to create a document for myself but at some point I started thinking about others who might also be fighting to feel like they have a right to be alive. My hope is that the book would have meaning for others. As much as I feel more exposed than I would with a novel, there is a kind of honesty to it—an inescapable clarity that just is. This is who I am; this is my life—forty-five years of sadness, joy, achievement, and failure. It is really a book about a life lived and how we learn to accommodate our selves and our families.
Q.In the section of the memoir called “My Father’s Ass,” in which you write about going for a DNA blood test with your biological father, you see him at the lab walking away from you and you recognize his ass as your own. Is there an unavoidable legacy, a biological inheritance that one can’t escape?
A. Before I was “found” I had a rich fantasy life about who my parents were—there was enormous freedom in not knowing my background, a wonderful innocence. I could be anyone. As far as I was concerned, my parents were Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag. It made perfect sense—and still does—when one thinks about who one is informed by. Sontag and Kerouac were my chosen legacy. When I met my biological parents, I saw fragments of myself in them and was terrified. I wondered if I would keel over and die at a very young age as some of them did, or have a mid-life crisis that would ruin all that I’d built for myself, as both biological parents did independent of each other. Would I be “crazy” like my mother and so on. For the first time, I could feel the thumb print of DNA on my body. Having never known anyone related to me, I had to be told by others that I looked like my biological parents. Having never seen myself before, I didn’t know what I looked like. No doubt there is biology that one can’t escape, but at the same time, one can also hope to develop and improve upon that biological root.
Q. All of your work deals with identity in some form or another—characters struggling to reconcile the dissonance between their public and private lives. And this book too is not just about adoption but about universal questions: Who am I, where did I come from, how do I describe myself? Can you talk a bit about your identity and how it’s changed over time?
A. My identity—that’s a good one. Woody Allen’s film Zelig, about the “human chameleon,” had enormous resonance for me—that feeling of almost unconsciously shifting to accommodate is something I relate to. I grew up with enormous unknowns—questions but no answers. On the positive side, the flux or fluidity of my identity has been helpful to me as a writer—allowing me to crawl inside the experience of others. People always ask how I’m able to write from a male point of view and for me it’s entirely natural to be someone other than myself. The two areas where I have a more fixed identity are as a writer and, more recently, as a mother, and even those have their moments of identity crisis. When I was pregnant, Philip Roth came up to me at the National Book Awards, looked at my giant belly and said, “What did you go and do that for?” As though by becoming a mother, I’d given up my spot as a writer and/or by becoming a mother, I’d gone from being this mysterious ambisexual writer into being a girl. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a good thing. But if I was being honest, I would say that in many ways I am like a shape-shifter, reflecting what is already out there and yet I’m sure I must have an identity of my own. Let me keep looking, maybe I can find it around here somewhere.
Q. One of the most fascinating chapters of this book is “The Electronic Anthropologist” and your experience doing twenty-first-century genealogical research. Can you talk a bit about that?
A. I felt as though I’d stumbled down a wonderful rabbit hole—also known as the World Wide Web. I was able, through looking at such things as census documents and ship manifests, to locate an amazing amount of information from people all over the world. Even five years ago that would have been impossible to do. What was so invigorating about this chapter was that, despite the hard time my immediate biological relatives gave me, this research allowed me to reclaim my enthusiasm about my own history. I was able to connect not just to my biological parents but to hundreds who had come before me, and within that there was power, drama, and narrative—thousands of stories to be told. My imagination began to expand and that allowed me to take back the experience as my own, having been paralyzed by the early part of the story. And I loved dipping into history—looking at dozens and dozens of birth certificates and death certificates and trying to sort out the “right” people—the ones who were actually related to me—from the wrong ones. Sometimes the wrong ones were just as, if not more, interesting to find out about.
Q. There are a lot of well-known adopted people—from Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s to Apple Computer’s Steven Jobs to other writers such as Edward Albee and Jeanette Winterson. Can you talk about how being adopted may have influenced your work
A. Well, first off, if you’re going to have a club of famous adopted people you better do a bit more research, you’re leaving off the serial killer category: Son of Sam, Joel Rifkin, and so on. There are whole Web sites about adopted killers. But seriously I do think being adopted changes a person; it causes a dislocation, a kind of fracture that disrupts things.
In his books on becoming a writer John Gardner spoke about how all good writers have a chip on their shoulder or something they have to get over. I’m not sure it’s a chip on my shoulder, having grown up feeling on the outside. I sure worked hard to be known, to deliver myself to a larger world in some way. No doubt my sense of being an “outsider,” more an observer than a participant, has informed my writing. I don’t think there’s a particular “adopted” point of view, but clearly my experience of feeling removed gives me a way of looking at the world that is perhaps different from others and a perspective from which to write. Also I tend to notice things that others don’t—emotional details. The combination of my constitution and my experience taught me very early on to clue into the emotional states of others.
Q. If your biological parents hadn’t come looking for you, would you have looked for them? Are you sorry they found you?
A. No. I would not have looked for them. Someone once gave me a phone number for a woman who, for a fee, could reportedly find anyone in twenty-four hours. I carried that number with me for a long time and then curiously decided I wouldn’t call. And of course, it was just a few months later that my biological mother “found” me—which is somewhat unusual. It always seemed ironic—that only after I chose not to search did the information come to me. Am I sorry that they found me? As I say at the end of the book, “Did I choose to be found? No. Do I regret it? No. I couldn’t not know.”
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
US
Additional information
| Dimensions | 0.5500 × 5.0500 × 7.7000 in |
|---|---|
| Imprint | |
| ISBN-13 | |
| ISBN-10 | |
| Author | |
| Audience | |
| BISAC | |
| Subjects | inspirational books for women, family memoir, books for women, adoption, autobiographies, literary gifts, Child Development, autobiography books, relationship books, biographies and memoirs, memoirs, parenting book, books for living, adoption books for children, attachments, adoption books, FAM004000, adoption story, birth mother, biography, parenting, childhood, women, feminism, BIO022000, mindfulness, relationships, children, family, Literature, Memoir, drama, motherhood, parenting books, autobiography, biographies, discipline, attachment |
