O adoption memoir by lauded novelist Homes, recounting how she met her birth mother and father as an adult and freaked out over it, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.
1. For thou art so self-involved and over-dramatic that it's hard to believe this is the memoir of a woman in her 40s (and apparently a well-regarded writer), rather than some weepy teenager's diary.
- When she gets the call about her birth mother trying to find her: "After a lifetime spent in a virtual witness-protection program, I've been exposed." This doesn't make sense on any level. People go into witness protection because they want to avoid being murdered, because they're not safe. The only person who could have been exposed or unsafe here was Homes' mother, and the worry over that has long passed. Saying "I've been exposed" is self-dramatizing nonsense.
- As she learns more details: "Each earthquake of identity, each shift in the architecture of the precarious frame that I'd built for myself, threw me." The earthquake in question: she learns that her adoption wasn't through an agency, it was private. Oh, honestly. It's a little hard to swallow that such a minor detail could really cause a tectonic shift in one's entire Architecture of Identity. People come out of the closet with less angst.
- Her reaction to watching Schindler's List: "On all sides of me people are weeping, and yet I am finding the film uplifting—it is equal to what I am feeling." Well, I've heard self-aggrandizing comparisons to the Holocaust before now, but this must take the cake. Uplifting. Up. Lifting. The Holocaust. Equal to what she's feeling. Said without a blush. You know, I think that just speaks for itself.
- Her birthday is in December: "December, the season of joy, is the season of my secret sorrows."
- "Did I ever say how precariously positioned I feel—on the edge of the earth, as though my permit could be revoked at any second?"
- "the pain of how alone I feel"
2. For, memoir, thou art so puffed with great windy wind that in many cases the reader is left to wonder "what does that even mean?":
- "I grew up doused in grief. From day one, on a cellular level, I was perpetually in mourning." Well, "cellular" sounds dramatic, but it's an otherwise meaningless intensifier. You might as well say "planetary."
- On meeting her birth mother for first time, Homes says the woman is blind to her: "Invisibility is the thing I live in fear of. [No! Really? -Ed.] I implode, folding like origami. I try to speak but have no words. My response is primitive, before language, before cognition—the memory of the body." Okay, first of all, origami does not implode. The folding is pretty much the exact opposite of random crumpling; you carefully fold paper in precise ways along predefined lines that produce multitudes of recognizable shapes from simple sheets of paper. Homes just thinks the word origami makes her sound cool. Everyone has had the experience of being too overwhelmed to speak, but Homes has to tart it up beyond recognition.
- Her birth mother, like the adoptive family's son, dies from kidney disease: "And I cannot escape the nearly biblical connection of the kidney." Now, beautiful Google tells me that kidneys are mentioned five times in the Bible as the organs examined by God to judge an individual. But if that's the inescapable connection, or "nearly" a connection, Homes doesn't make it. And it can't be genetic.
3. For, memoir, thou showest not the least insight into how weirdly manipulative Homes is toward Ellen, her birth mother, while complaining all the time about how she doesn't know enough about her origins.
- Homes asks for a letter from Ellen, then another one, then for a long time refuses to give her phone number or to meet.
- She feels free to hire a PI to investigate Ellen, but freaks out when Ellen does some investigating herself and shows up at one of Homes's readings.
- Homes refuses contact after a while; then, after her mother's death, she picks up her things, then doesn't open the boxes for seven years, at which point she has a million questions that she agonizes over not having the answers to, questions she could have asked her mom when alive.
4. For, memoir, thou art similarly unaware of how unpleasantly superior Homes feels to her birth parents:
- Homes sneeringly recounts Ellen's bad taste: She smokes. Orders a Harveys Bristol Cream. Wears a rabbit-skin coat!
- Norman, her birth father, tells her proudly that the day's Gazette just happens to have photos of both A.M. and his legitimate daughter: "And to top it off—Norman thinks this picture of his daughter taking her kids to a fashion show at McDonald's is equal to an article on me giving a reading from my third book. . . . She has fat thighs, a belly, and paws for hands, but I'm sure she dresses right for lunch. It's depressing as hell." Indeed. But not for the reason you think.
5. For, memoir, thou art lazy, substituting many dashes for more thoughtful punctuation, and faking seriousness by not using contractions.
6. For, memoir, thou art boring, repeating over and over the same adolescent "who am I really" blatherings, and spending far too much time on extremely boring genealogy, going into way too much minutiae about both her adoptive and birth lineages.
7. For, memoir, thou hast used the completely tired out The X's Daughter/Mother/Wife title meme.
8. For, memoir, thou hast blurbed thyself with misleading blurbs, either that or co-opted otherwise respectable writers such as Amy Tan, Zadie Smith, and Mary Gaitskill into praising that which is crap.
In short, I really hated this adolescent, self-pitying, over-dramatizing, narcissistic, over-padded, and pretty much worthless memoir by a writer I will never read again. Do not recommend.
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