Chunks of time go by in the form of years between the last phone call and the oddly familiar voice on the other end of the phone. I’ll replay the message several times, searching for a clue. How did he get this number? What does he want? What will I say this time? The scenario is the same each time. I’m a little older, but, while increasingly wary, apparently no wiser since I’ll walk into the same mess yet again by agreeing to a meeting.

My father called two summers ago, the first time in the then five years that I’d been with Beth. Nobody’s family is perfect, but I like to think that my situation qualifies for at least an upper-management position on Dante’s board of advisors. Trying to explain the family tree to my partner involved multiple sheets of paper with overlapping flow charts. I gave up after trying to justify parenthetical references. Suffice to say, "bitter" doesn’t begin to describe the relationships of the surviving members, and a phone call from my father—apparently between jobs and/or jail time with phone minutes to burn—was not exactly a welcome or expected overture. The result? An awkward daylong visit where he tried too hard to pretend everything was normal. It was surreal; the highly-social, overly familiar act that attracted me to my sporadically-paternal father growing up was still there, but as an adult I could see through the superficial charm, the haze of denial, and the broken capillaries on his face. The phone calls ended a month or so later, largely a relief to both of us I’m sure.

A.M. Homes brings an astonishing voice to a similar familial uncertainty in her latest book, a memoir called The Mistress’s Daughter. Largely a fiction writer, the author of the novel In a Country of Mothers and the short story collection The Safety of Objects (among many others) makes her own unusual experiences with the ties that bind the subject of her most recent musing. Interestingly enough, it was after In a Country of Mothers, which deals with the theme of adoption, was well into the publication process that Homes was contacted for the first time by her biological mother, Ellen.

The intensely private Homes, a Washington D.C. native, seems to rarely answer extremely personal questions directly in her interviews (according to an interview with The Washington Post, when asked if she were "gay" Homes refused a label, simply insisting that she’d dated both men and women, pointing out that questions about home and family dog female writers more than male, a sentiment I’ve expressed myself more than once). How is it then that she can allow her large readership to investigate this portion of her life? It seems as though Homes (given name: "Amy"—she likes the distance from her work that the two initials give her as an author) struggled so much to get through this reunification with her biological parents that she used the medium she was already comfortable with to make sense of it all.

And what a story to make sense of. Homes grew up in what she describes as an "intellectual" family; she knew she was adopted, but was missing details until she cornered her mother as a young adult. She finally learned the truth: Homes is the "mistress’s daughter," the product of a seven-year affair between a very young woman and her older, married lover. She was not adopted through an organization as her parents first suggest, but instead found her way to her adoptive family in the typical secretive manner that typifies many 1950s and 1960s family issues: community whispers. "The amount of mystery that surrounded the proceedings was enormous, everything was subtext and secrecy. Beneath the intrigue was the element of shame that no one ever talked about." Homes’s parents had recently lost a biological child to kidney problems, but their new daughter grew up with loving parents who never seemed to understand what to do about the cloud of confusion surrounding their daughter’s fumbling for identity.

At thirty-one years old, the already successful writer received a message from her biological mother offering some sort of relationship. Over the next few years, the author reeled as the disturbed mistress circled her, leaving odd messages on her phone, begging for meetings, kind words, a relationship ("You should adopt me!" chastised Ellen in one particularly uncomfortable conversation). After only one meeting, Homes’s mother died, leaving her with more questions about both her mother and herself than answers. Homes went to her mother’s last home to examine her possessions, finding the pieces of an undeveloped woman.

Ellen was the young mistress who never grew up; among her belongings is a piece of luggage: "And there is a small blue vanity case—the kind of thing you’d see in a movie, Audrey Hepburn or Barbara Streisand carrying it through the airport, a bellhop following with other, larger bags [...] It is filled with the debris, crumbs of a life lived [...] The suitcase sums her up—it wouldn’t have surprised me to find pieces of Lego in there or parts of a toy. It was, on one hand, a sophisticated piece of luggage, and yet its condition gave the appearance of having been used by a child, a girl playing adult. I leave it behind—it’s too much, too intimate, like taking her toothbrush from its cup." Instead, she took stacks of paper, scraps of life like receipts, piled them in boxes marked "Dead Ellen" and sealed them for the next decade. Unfortunately, her relationship with her biological father, who is still living, didn’t provide Homes with any solace either.

Norman was Ellen’s boss as a teenager. He gave her the attention she lacked, doting on her with expensive showy gifts, an obsession with which would plague her until death. Norman was a charismatic but superficial, image-centered man with a grown family. Everyone except his wife was unaware of the affair and Homes’s existence. Although he initially expressed an interest in welcoming his daughter into the family (post-DNA test), the offer dissolved into a clandestine series of hotel meetings and confidential phone calls. Homes got the strange feeling that he equated her with his former mistress. He criticized her appearance, was concerned that she wasn’t married, and sent her several inappropriate gifts (one child-like piece of jewelry and one expensive cashmere sweater). In a recent interview with National Public Radio, Homes reflected that her two biological parents came from "two different sets of circumstances;" clearly, both had what she described as a "hard time dealing with reality" (see www.npr.org/books to listen to the interview).

In the end, Homes does come to some healthy realizations. One that resonates with me is that often our families—chosen, adoptive, biological—all have some impact on our identities, but other factors count too. "Are you you?" is the question A.M. Homes greeted her Washington Post interviewer with. Sometimes I just wish I had a clearer answer.