Books

Like many adopted children, novelist A.M. Homes had fantasized about meeting her biological parents. Her birth mother, she imagined, was a goddess – beautiful, capable and competent.

But the goddess Ms. Homes once dreamed about was in reality a needy figure scarred forever by her affair with an older, married man who abandoned her. She surprised Ms. Homes by initiating contact at age 31, creating a tense and complicated relationship.

The experience of meeting her birth parents is the subject of Ms. Homes' latest work, The Mistress's Daughter (Viking, $24.95). She will appear Friday at 7 p.m. at Arts & Letters Live's Literary Cafe in the Dallas Museum of Art's Horchow Auditorium to discuss her book.

It is a tale that took her more than 14 years to write and captures her constant reshaping of identity as an adoptive daughter, the search to redefine her notion of family and her ultimate need to examine the familial ties that bind.

As a writer, Ms. Homes, now 45, deals with all of this in the only way she knows how – with prose that is deceptively simple as it weaves through complex emotions laced with humor and pain.

"I was already a writer," Ms. Homes says during a recent telephone interview. "I had more skills than others in talking about these things. I was able to take emotion and the primitive experience and find language for it. But I would say it was among the hardest things I have ever done."

There was the need to get it right, Ms. Homes says. She wanted her story to be factually accurate and emotionally dead-on, even though she knew it would be painful for her adoptive parents. And although Ms. Homes describes her relationship with them as "very, very close," she found she couldn't share her emotions.

"It was very threatening for them when my biological family returned," she says. "It was very difficult to ask them to understand what I was going through."

In the book, as Ms. Homes struggles with her birth mother's needs, she is also dealing with her wealthy birth father, who insists upon a DNA test, then turns silent.

At one point, after her birth mother dies, Ms. Homes becomes obsessed with her roots, both adoptive and biological. She digs through documents, court records, scrolls the Internet, seeking connections to the past.

As a novelist, Ms. Homes understands the power of adding or subtracting a detail in a story. She understands that such subtle changes alter a character. And as an adoptive daughter, she has learned that each time she is given another fragment of her life narrative, her identity is subtly shifted, too.

"It's fascinating, really," says Ms. Homes. "It's an ongoing process. It used to be that traditionally, when talking about adoption, if you had issues or problems, you were expected to deal with them and get over it. Now, more and more people are realizing that it moves with you and changes. You don't walk through your daily life thinking, 'I am adopted,' but in subtle ways, it is there. And that is OK."

But don't think the book is a cathartic exercise that brings closure for Ms. Homes. It is more like a document that marks a particular piece of her story. She still feels disappointment and sadness that her birth father cracked opened a door to his family's story, only to shutter it. There is much more she wants to know.

But she also knows this. Her identity has been shaped and molded by her four families – whether it's the one she grew up in or the one where she shares biological roots.

"This is not a question of nature or nurture. You can't tease that out," Ms. Homes says. "I am all of those things. There is no escaping. I am the sum of my parts and it isn't two plus two equals four. There is a sense that it is more complicated than that."

She says she feels lucky that she didn't grow up with her biological parents. She is moved that her adoptive mother thought the book is the best thing she has ever written – ironic for Ms. Homes, an acclaimed novelist who despises memoirs. And she feels lucky to have her daughter, Juliet, a child she chose to have several years ago after the death of her beloved adoptive grandmother.

Her daughter, she says, reminds her of her grandmother even though there are no shared biological roots. Ms. Homes feels a basic connection to the child that she hasn't felt with anyone else. In the end, she says, it is each of these ties that bind.

"I feel lucky," Ms. Homes says.

Karen M. Thomas is a freelance writer in Arlington.

Read an excerpt from The Mistress's Daughter at GuideLive.com/extra

A.M. Homes will discuss The Mistress's Daughter at 7 p.m. Friday at Arts & Letters Live's Literary Cafe at the Dallas Museum of Art, Horchow Auditorium. For information on tickets, call 214-922-1818 or go to www.DallasMuseumofArt.org.