Hell-o mother!

>>A.M. Homes’s The Mistress’s Daughter is a memoir of the author’s nightmarish
reunion with her troubled old lady

by Juliet Waters

A.M. Homes is notorious for balancing bizarre, perverse and surreal plots with mundane images of suburban life: a boy dates, seduces and eventually rapes a Mattel Barbie; a couple decides that instead of having a standard backyard BBQ, they’ll torch their house. If you didn’t know that The Mistress’s Daughter was a memoir of Homes’s reunion with her birth parents, you might mistake it for one of her novels.

The book opens on the day Homes’s adoptive parents reveal that her birth mother has contacted them through a lawyer. “I remember their insistence that I come into the living room and sit down and how the dark room seemed suddenly threatening, how I stood in the kitchen doorway holding a jelly doughnut and how I never eat jelly doughnuts.”

We share in Homes’s irritation as they discuss how long it took them to decide whether or not to tell her. She’s 31 and about to have her third novel published. It’s not their information to keep, or their decision to make.

Irritation, however, turns to sympathy as we begin to understand the situation a little better. Ellen Ballman, Homes’s biological mother, is a piece of work. She decided to contact her daughter, she writes, after developing courage from watching Oprah and Maury. But the reality seems a little closer to Jerry Springer.

Ellen was 17 when she became pregnant by a much older, married man she’d been having an affair with for two years. Thirty years later, she’s a lonely, desperate antique from the ’60s. She’s a chain smoker who still hasn’t given up her beehive, who suggests in one of their earliest conversations that she and Homes “have their portrait painted,” who sends Homes birthday cards and gifts appropriate for a child, who increasingly makes angry, obsessive, needy pleas that Homes “adopt” her and who, eventually, begins to stalk her own daughter.

Worse in some ways, however, is Homes’s birth father, who also becomes involved in the psychodrama. He seems, on the surface, to be saner. But increasingly, Norman Hecht emerges as the kind of narcissistic, manipulative asshole who has affairs with teenagers. The kind of man who presents himself as a community leader, but who feels compelled to tell his birth daughter on the first meeting that he’s not circumcised and that her birthmother was “a slut who knew more than her years—things a young girl shouldn’t know.”

Weirdly, the reunion sparks another reunion, and Homes discovers that her birth parents are spending more time with each other than with her.

The first half of the book is as disturbing as that archetypal car crash you can’t turn away from. And it gets worse after Ellen dies alone of kidney failure. As Homes searches into her mother’s past, she discovers the history of a real estate grifter, a woman who exploited nearly anyone she ever came into contact with, who was literally run out of every town she ever lived in, until the only person left to exploit was the daughter she abandoned.

Unfortunately, the second half of the book reads less like a car crash and more like an interminable wait in a hospital. Homes develops an obsession with genealogy that becomes the groundwork for a legitimate, but chronic grievance against Hecht. Early in their reunion, he obliged her to take a DNA test to prove she was his daughter. Now that she needs the official results to further her research, he has cut off contact with her.

He’s a creep, but his character is, if nothing else, consistent. It’s surprising that a writer as character driven as Homes would expect more. Before requesting the DNA results, Homes published a story about their reunion in The New Yorker. Exposing a shameless narcissist is rarely the way into their empty, barely beating heart. Denying her is the only denial he has left.

Homes lets go, but only after a good long period of mundane, obsessive grieving. The kind of grieving that may eventually make for a healthier life, but in the meantime poisons a compelling book.

The Mistress’s Daughter by A.M.
Homes, Viking, hc, 240pp., $31