The Mistress’s daughter is the riveting memoir of A.M. Homes and her relationship with her birth parents. The story begins when, at age 31, she goes home for Christmas and her mother tells her that someone is looking for her.

“After a lifetime spent in a virtual witness-protection program, I’ve been exposed. I get up knowing one thing about myself: I am the mistress’s daughter. My birth mother was young and unmarried, my father older and married, with a family of his own.  When I was born, in December of 1961, a lawyer called my adoptive parents and said, ‘Your package has arrived and it’s wrapped in pink ribbons.’”

It is her birth mother that is trying to reach her.  As she hears the day of her birth described, she plays it like a movie in her head and her birth mother, Ellen Ballman, she imagines to be like Audrey Hepburn.

“In my dreams, my birth mother is a goddess, the queen of queens, the CEO, the DFO and the COO.  Movie-star beautiful, incredibly competent, she can take care of anyone and anything.  She has made a  fabulous life for herself as ruler of the world, except for one missing link-me.”

Homes demands several letters before she has direct contact with her, and immediately a picture very different than her fantasy begins to unfold.  She gets a sense of her Ellen’s history and family, health and also finds out the name of her birth father.  She sees Ellen’s poor grammar and hears her raspy voice. She describes their phone conversations,

“They are seductive, addictive, punishing…Each time I tell her something, she takes the information and holds it too close, reinventing it and delivering it back to me in a manner that leaves me wanting to tell her less, wanting her to know nothing.”

When I first began pursing adoption, a friend described a “primal loss” that all adopted people have.  With my own foster children, I had to watch them experience this in a very confusing context each time they left a visit from their birth parents. This story alone could carry my interest in this book, since I am always interested to hear the story of adopted adults. What I appreciate about this particular story is the way that this primal loss is experienced, articulated and held.

Of course, the reality for adopted children that are reuniting with their birth parents can vary widely. And now, the types of adoptions vary widely with open adoption being much more common, where it was previously almost unheard of.  A very typical story is one that contradicts the fairy tales and the birth parent just can never show up in the ways that anyone would hope.

From this story, I got the sense that Homes experienced this loss and came to realize that it was something that could never be filled for her because she could never have a fantasy mom.  On the other hand, it also seemed that the power of the loss and the fantasy were nearly eradicated by developing a relationship with her birth parents.

The plot thickens when the author meets her birth father, Norman. It is weird, but not as scary as her relationship with her mother, which would drown her if she let it.  He plans to meet her in hotels, talks badly about her birth mother (who he still seems to have a flame for)  and says oddly inappropriate things.  He asks for a DNA test although she looks just like him.

For a while, Homes continues to develop her relationships with them, but her birth parents only manage to overwhelm her in opposite fashions.  Ellen tries to smother her with immaturity, neediness and demands.  Meanwhile Norman proves that he is still the man that he was when he left Ellen, young and pregnant with false hopes and a shattered life.  He rejects Homes and blocks her out, only interested in keeping his life status quo.

After Homes’ initial interactions with her parents, she begins a quest to learn more about her genealogy by researching her birth and adoptive family histories.  One chapter lost me when it got into the details of this and in my opinion, should have been excluded from the book.  But, it is because of her research that some crucial and shocking elements of the story unfold.

While this does not go down as one of my favorite memoirs, I am glad that I read it and would recommend it.  It manages to be disastrous and brave, tragic and caustic.