An adoptee, exposed

Years after reuniting with my own birth mother, reading A.M. Homes' new memoir of adoption was like finding the journal I never kept.

By Emma Pearse

Read more: Adoption, Life

April 12, 2007 | For the past three weeks I've been carrying around A.M. Homes' new memoir of adoption, "The Mistress's Daughter," like it's a purse that holds all of my essential items: driver's license, cash, lip gloss. The book is Homes' first autobiographical work after seven volumes of barbed, love-drenched fiction. It's also a story that almost eerily mirrors my own, a story I move through life simultaneously avoiding (for fear of never escaping) and blurting out (because without it, nothing makes sense). I am an adoptee who reunited with my birth parents at the age of 17. "I remember not knowing," Homes writes on the first page of "The Mistress's Daughter." "First thinking something was very wrong, assuming it was death -- someone had died. And then I remember knowing."

I too have two beginnings: The day I arrived at my adoptive parents' home, age 6 weeks, and the day I met my birth mother. I too remember not knowing and then knowing.

Homes' tale is a traumatic one, inhabited by the sorts of disturbed, perverse characters that will already be familiar to fans of her fiction, and set within the same mundane sphere of existence in which Homes routinely stages her stories. But this time the characters are real -- as is their confusion, their perversion, their mediocrity. And at the center of it all is Homes herself. She narrates the story of her reunion with her birth parents at age 31 and her subsequent search for her "life story," all while recounting childhood memories that seem suddenly significant, and journeying through vaguely illicit meetings with her newly discovered parents. Finally, Homes takes to obsessive Web and library genealogy searches, desperate to locate anyone who might be related to her: an investigation into biological lineage that is ultimately more traumatic than it is uplifting -- and that confirms her conviction: "I am an amalgam. I will always be something glued together."

"The Mistress's Daughter" joins a well-stocked shelf. There's plenty of literature about adoption; I know because psychiatrists and family members, including my birth mother, have nudged me to read it, supposing it will help me deal with the intense emotions and surreal urges that only I seem to experience. And hidden among the self-help schlock there have been a few gems. " Family Wanted: Stories of Adoption," is an unfortunately titled -- but mostly beautifully written -- collection of stories about adopting or being adopted, told by literary luminaries like Paula Fox, Robert Dessaix, Tama Janowitz and Homes herself. (The essay Homes wrote for the collection "Witness Protection" spurred her to write the memoir.) Until now, though, I've begrudgingly avoided the adoption genre. This has been partly in the name of self-protection: Must I really absorb all these gloomy versions of my own story? But also I've simply been turned off by the lovey, woe-ridden language: treacly pinks and frosted greens, photos of sad-eyed, chubby babies and titles like "Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby?" It all seemed to reek of victimhood and to equate the adoptee experience with other unfortunate afflictions like depression an alcoholism.

On the flip side of all those reassuring, boring books are the idolized adoptees who littered the popular culture of my youth. I grew up reading and watching Annie, Punky Brewster, Pippi Longstocking; even Popeye had that babbling bundle of joy, Swee'Pea. Some of those characters were technically orphans, yes -- the difference being that orphans have lost their parents before any alternative arrangements could be made -- but their appeal was based on the vigorous individuality that is presumed to emerge in the absence of birth parents. I consumed their stories hungrily because they were entertaining and because their prettily peculiar lives were closer to my true fantasies than was Barbie or those golden twins of the "Sweet Valley High" novels. But none of them made me reconsider my own story in any meaningful way.

Homes' memoir does. "The Mistress's Daughter" is the first tale I've read that details and deconstructs the experience in a way that isn't so sappy that it makes me want to, well, not be adopted. There's vulnerability in Homes' nonfiction storytelling that's too often lacking in her fiction. Even the book jacket, papered by a seductive photo of Homes as a child -- baring the same deep catty eyes that have stared from countless author photos -- says, for the first time: This is me. What's more, her story is almost mine, from the initial family meeting in the living room, revealing that "someone is looking for you," to the moment in her adoptive mother's kitchen when it all became too much. Reading in "The Mistress's Daughter" about Homes' fear of attachment and "equally constant fear of loss," about her persistent childhood suspicions that "every family was better than mine," was like stumbling upon the diary I never kept.

This is Homes' tale: Her mother, Ellen, and birth father, Norman, had an adulterous affair and conceived Homes when Ellen was 22. When it became clear that Norman did not intend to leave his wife and wed Ellen, as he had promised, she gave up Homes to a liberal, artsy, middle-class family who had recently lost a son to kidney failure. As birth mother and child get closer, Ellen turns out to be rather loopy -- a needy, self-centered woman who calls Homes on Valentine's Day and, upset that her daughter has not sent her a valentine, tells her, "You can just go to the roof of your building and jump off." Ellen's behavior is consistently obnoxious; still Homes paints an empathetic picture of her birth mother, a petite woman who chain-sucks on cigarettes and seems to want only to love and be loved. She is intelligent but dysfunctional, portrayed as a victim both of her gender and time, and of her own mental instability. Norman, on the other hand, comes off as a brash, insensitive man, still married to the woman to whom he was unfaithful with Ellen, with his four other children safely hidden in a large house in Washington, D.C. Homes and he meet in clandestine spurts over the course of a few years, in hotels and restaurants, like lovers. Norman seems to struggle with feelings of responsibility to Homes, but ultimately abandons their relationship, leaving her alone to grapple with the unwieldy pieces of her biological heritage.

Next page: Homes has taken her personal life and offered it as collective