BOOK REVIEWS
1. The Mistress's Daughter, by A.M. Homes (Penguin Books paperback, 2007) -- (of especial interest to adoptees who are members of interfaith families, and biological adult children and grandchildren of intermarriage).
Homes is an adoptee, and the book is a memoir of the very sad (though sometimes comic) consequences of being "found" by her unstable biological parents.
Homes was in her early 30's, an adoptee raised by a kindly, intellectual, left-wing Jewish family, who had been told that one of her birth parents was Jewish and one was Catholic. Her birth parents had not been married.
On the scaffolding of these "facts," Homes, like many adoptees, fantasized a beautiful birth mother, a successful career woman who lacked only one thing in her life -- Homes.
When her birthmother found Homes, she learned that the backstory was both inaccurate and far more awful than she could ever have imagined.
Homes, a brilliantly talented, award-winning writer, brought up in an emotionally level, middle class, reticent Jewish leftist family, was not prepared for her birth parents at all.
Both of her birth parents were patrilineal -- each one had a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, and had been raised Catholic, with her birth father identifying as Christian and her birth mother as a Jew. Both seemed hopelessly confused about their ethnicit(ies) and religious beliefs.
In contrast to her quiet, intellectual adoptive parents, her birth parents were loud, exhuberant, not well educated, and clearly still rooted in the working class despite their middle class lifestyles, creating enormous communications problems between them and the austerely literate Homes.
Homes experienced the maddening sensation of looking like both of her birth parents and having some of their personal habits and reactions, but being unable to understand many of their habitual emotional reactions and thought patterns, which eventually led to her estrangement from both of them.
It is heartbreaking to see how all three of them tried to talk with each other and ended up with hurt feelings, anger, and withdrawal.
Holmes learned, after her birth mother's death, some very terrible secrets about her birth mother's life, and has clearly been left sometimes feeling helpless, guilty, and profoundly saddened, and at the same time asking herself, what more could she have done, given her mother's severe problems and their inability to communicate with each other?
Homes endured a rollercoaster ride with her birth father and his family as well, never sure if she would be acknowledged or remain the family's guilty secret. Her anger at them burns on the page.
It is definitely a book that will interest many adult descendants of intermarriage who are adoptees and also many adult children and grandchildren of intermarriage. It is a sobering reminder that blood may be thicker than water, but it does not guarantee compatibility or family happiness. -- Robin Margolis