Psychology, Biology, and Family Secrets

The Bookforum Interview

For nearly twenty years, fiction writer A. M. Homes has engrossed readers with novels and stories that subvert the placid surface of suburban life. On Christmas in 1992, Homes's life appeared to mirror her fiction—her adoptive parents told the then-thirty-one-year-old author that her birth mother, Ellen Ballman, wanted to meet her. Ellen, a desperately lonely woman who never wed or had another child after her breakup with Homes's biological father, Norman Hecht, a married man with a family of his own, was eager to make up for lost time—three decades' worth. In her new memoir, The Mistress's Daughter (Viking), Homes evokes a surreal, at times harrowing quest for self-discovery and the meaning of family that places her at the center of an unresolved drama between parents she's never known. Each birth parent comes to her with a strange agenda: Ellen demands a caretaker; Norman wants proof of paternity and in return offers her a place in his family, a promise he never fulfills. After Ellen dies of kidney failure in 1998, Homes collects four boxes of papers and photographs from her mother's decrepit Atlantic City home that she hopes will shed some light on the history of this mysterious woman's life and, in turn, her own. Instead, they reveal the disjointed story of a deeply troubled woman with a loose grasp of reality. I met with Homes in a cozy West Village café in the aftermath of a February snowstorm. We talked about the sleepless nights she spent pursuing her genealogy on the Web, the experience of being a subject in your own story, and what it means to live in a country of too many mothers.—Kera Bolonik

A. M. Homes in New York, 2006.

BOOKFORUM: You've published seven books of fiction and written for film and television. What was it like to turn the lens on yourself for the first time?

A. M. HOMES: Some years ago, I remember seeing posters of a vivisected monkey in restraints, and that was how I felt writing the memoir. It was very painful, but I was determined to get the story right and articulate all that it stirred up.

BF: In The Mistress's Daughter, you describe being frustrated and impatient with Ellen. Were you concerned about presenting yourself this way to readers?

AMH: No, not really. I think the hardest part is to try and find language for really primitive emotions.

BF: Some people write memoirs to make discoveries about themselves. Did you start this project knowing what you'd find?

AMH: No. I started writing this story as it happened. It wasn't about publishing, it was about getting it down. I don't know that I could have written it if I hadn't written the nine books before it. Autobiographical writing is not something that comes naturally to me. I tried to use the same skills that I use as a fiction writer—storytelling, building character, narrative structure—to investigate myself.

BF: In your memoir, you write, "I can't escape the oddity of how it happened that I, a person without a past, became a novelist, a storyteller working from my imagination to create lives that never existed."Do you think you write fiction because you felt you grew up without your own story?

AMH: I honestly don't know. I do think it's ironic that an adopted person who grew up having to create a narrative for herself would go into the business of creating narratives for others. I had a fantasy life about [my birth parents], and I had some ongoing stories about myself and the world around me.

BF: When did your parents tell you that you were adopted?

AMH: There wasn't a definitive moment when they told me—I always knew. There is something incredibly liberating about not knowing who you are, because you really could be anything. When my biological family appeared, I lost that. I was scared of the idea that I could be like those people.

BF: Had you considered looking for your birth mother before receiving her letter?

AMH: When I was working on In a Country of Mothers [1993], somebody gave me a number of a private investigator in Florida. I carried the number for a long time. But in the end, I didn't do it. I felt that I was at peace with who I was.

BF: Does the psychotherapist from In a Country of Mothers give us a sense of the kind of birth mother you imagined for yourself?

AMH: In my imagination, my parents were Susan Sontag and Jack Kerouac, and I was the product of a horrible one-night stand. You make up stories about whom you might be related to, and you see things in people. For instance, Elton John has a space between his teeth, and I have a space between my teeth. You look at famous people because who else are you going to look at? The mailman?

BF: You opened the boxes of papers in 2005, seven years after you recovered them from Ellen's home in Atlantic City. They revealed an assortment of sordid facts about her life that did not correlate with the portrait she offered of herself.

AMH: I found that she was even more depressing than I expected [laughs].

BF: Your birth parents ended their seven-year-long affair after Ellen got pregnant with you, and they hadn't spoken to each other for more than thirty years.

AMH: I felt like a go-between for parents I never even knew I had. I was like, Who are you people? They were very drawn to each other, and each had some fantasies about the whole thing.

BF: In both the memoir and In a Country of Mothers, you portray a kind of courtship between the child and the birth parent that takes on the urgency of an affair.

AMH: I experienced meeting my biological father as if I were a mistress, not as someone who was displaced or given away. When I was doing research on adoption [while writing In a Country of Mothers], I learned that sexual tension between biological parents and their children is a very real issue. There are theories about how a birth parent and child who've reunited are fundamentally trying to re-create a kind of intimate experience. Yet as adults, the expression of intimacy is very different from the way children express intimacy. Cuddling or whatever becomes really different between two adults who don't know each other.

BF: Norman always wanted to meet you in hotels. That must have been unsettling.

AMH: It's hard to know what it means to the person. When we finally had lunch with his wife, we also met at a hotel. And when he asked me to take the DNA test, as awful as it sounded, part of me thought, "I want to know who you people are, too."Norman very much didn't want Ellen to know that we even did the DNA test. He said that his wife was the one who required it—I didn't know whether that was true or not. In his version of the story, he was somehow Ellen's victim, and she was a nymphomaniac.

BF: Despite all that, you like Norman.

AMH: He wasn't overtly psychologically threatening [laughs]. He was more normal. I also feel, in a way, that the "mom slot"in my life is very well occupied. And the "dad slot,"well, I could have used some more. I would have liked to have a relationship with Norman. I wish I could have liked Ellen, but I found her really off-putting and scary and not living in a reality that I knew or could relate to. It was very hard to deal with it.

BF: Had you anticipated putting off your first meeting with Ellen after you spoke to her on the phone?

AMH: No. Rejecting my birth mother was about the last thing I would have expected. I really didn't know that I would have been so frightened of her. Her mood and tenor and needs would shift and change very abruptly. Ellen is not a reliable narrator of her own life. She couldn't really answer a question about herself, which also made me feel fragile and loath to ask her a question.

BF: Do you anticipate writing autobiographical works again?

AMH: I really hope not [laughs]. I feel a sense of accomplishment in having finished this memoir. I've lived with this story for a long time. You become a writer because you want
to make contact with people and you want to be known. As someone who has lived a lot of her lifetime in a public kind of way, it's very ironic that I'm about to become much more
well known in such an intimate way for the story that is both my big secret and the truth of who I am.