A.M. Homes has written ten books and won a host of awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, but she said her latest book, a memoir about being adopted, was the hardest to write.

The Bookworm Beat recently spoke with the American writer via telephone just three weeks after ‘Mistress’s Daughter’ was released by Viking. It has already found its way to bestseller lists in the United States.

“This was absolutely more difficult to write than my novels,” said Ms Homes who is the author of ‘This Book will Save Your Life’ and ‘In a Country of Mothers’ among others. “I truly am a novelist and I work from my imagination. Novelists work with things that are non-existent. They have to worry about psychic accuracy, but they don’t have to worry about hurting someone’s feelings.”

The ‘Mistress’s Daughter’ chronicles her experiences after her biological mother finds her as an adult. In the book, she learns that she was the product of an affair between a young girl and her much older, married boss. The reunion is far from the stuff of television specials. Ms Homes develops an uneasy relationship with both her birth parents.

Unfortunately, time does nothing to improve these relationships. Her biological mother dies suddenly, and her biological father just as suddenly breaks off all contact because it makes his wife uncomfortable.

“It is a very difficult subject matter,” Ms Homes said. “To think it would be cathartic to write this book would be to underestimate how painful it was. To spend time thinking about it and writing about it was very difficult. It was much more difficult than writing fiction.”

She said it took her much longer to write ‘The Mistress’s Daughter’ than it took her to write her fiction novels.

“I started making the notes for it in 1992,” she said. “It took me a long, long time to write.”

The Mistress’s Daughter will soon be available in 18 different countries, and Ms Homes hopes it will be a starting point for conversation about adoption. She said she wanted to give other adopted people who weren’t as articulate as herself, a framework to discuss their experiences.

“The notion that it is not a perfect world or experience was important,” she said.

The second half of the book, which details her emotional life after her biological father breaks off their fledgling relationship, is extremely dark and brooding. In one chapter she asks her father a series of questions, as though he was being questioned in a courtroom. There are no answers.

“The second half of the book is purposely quite different than the first half,” she said. “The first half is a pretty straightforward memoir. I wanted to take a sledge hammer and crack the story open. I wanted to look at what the fallout is from all of these kinds of experiences.”

She said the adoption world tends to be broken into factions, birth mother, birth child and adopted parent.

“All parts of the triad have something in common, but they often behave as if they are in opposition,” she said. “I wanted to talk about the importance of each person’s experience. Each person’s experience is a unique experience.

“People say adopted people shouldn’t go looking for information about themselves. This is absolutely not true. Each person has their own situation. The most important thing is to recognise the variety.”

Ms Homes said it is important for adopted parents to realise that adoption isn’t something you talk about once and then put away in a drawer.

“Adoption is not a one time event in someone’s life,” she said. “It fluctuates over time. It is an issue that a child often goes back to at every new stage of their life. It is an ongoing process. People who adopt children have to be clear about what their own feelings are and be clear to themselves about why they are adopting.”

She said that although not every adopted person needs to know or even wants to know about their past, they all have the right to know.

“That is the more important question,” she said. “We have laws that stop people from finding out who they are. You are denying the person to access to information about themselves.”

In terms of her adopted family, she said they have been very supportive of her book.

“They like the book a lot,” she said. “My mother keeps saying it is the best thing I have ever written. They are very proud. They feel good about how I was able to deal with it. As the events was unfolding they were very threatened by the return of the blood family. They thought they would lose me to them. It has been an interesting and long process. It means a lot to me how pleased they are. It speaks to their strength as well.

“They don’t always come off so great in the story either, but they know it is true.”

An important part of the book is the family history of both her adopted and biological family. Ms Homes became a genealogy buff, joining such websites as genealogy.com and ancestry.com to learn more about her heritage.

She learned that she could join the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) organisation, for people descended from the original European American settlers. Unfortunately, her biological father refused to release the DNA results which would have made it possible for her to join.

“The thing I came to realise was that I am not just my mother’s child,” she said. “I really am the product of all of my family lines, not just a single generation. Through time you begin to realise the decisions people made hundreds of years ago resonate through generations. That was fascinating for me. I was noticing why people do come to different countries at different times.”

To learn more about Ms Homes and her books go to her website at http://www.amhomesbooks.com/. To contact the Bookworm Beat email bookwormbeat1@hotmail.com .