Read Online The Mistress's Daughter by A. M. Homes - Free Book Online

the reading, the librarian asks if I am willing to answer questions from the audience. “I’d be happy to.” Hands go up.
    I used to believe that every question deserved an answer, I used to feel obligated to answer everything as fully and honestly as possible. I don’t anymore.
    â€œWhere do your ideas come from?” someone asks.
    â€œFrom you,” I say. The crowd laughs. I look at the woman asking the question; she seems innocent enough. I continue. “I get them from looking at the world we live in, from reading the paper, watching the news. It seems as though what I write is often extreme, but in truth it happens every day.”
    There are questions posed as challenges, tests. I have the sense that depending on my answer, they might say, You’re lying, I know this and that fact about you.
    I point to a raised hand.
    â€œDo you write autobiographically?”
    I feel the watchers zooming in.
    â€œNo.” I say. “I have yet to write anything that is truly autobiographical.”
    They are taunting me.
    â€œAre you adopted?”
    â€œYes, and I’m coming up for adoption again soon, so if anyone is interested, please let the librarian at the back of the room know.” More laughter.
    â€œDo you know who your parents are? Have you searched?”
    â€œI am always searching,” I say, “but no, I have not searched in that way.”
    Â 
    December 18, 1993. My birthday, the lightning rod, the axis around which I spin. I hold myself braced against it—an anticelebration.
    How can a person with no history have a birthday? Are you sure it’s my birthday? Are you sure of how old I am? How do you know? What proof do you have?
    I was born in 1961. My birth certificate was issued in 1963. Is that normal? Was there a delay because I belonged to no one, hovered in limbo land, waiting to become someone?
    For those two missing years did I have another name?
    To add to the confusion, my birthday is in the middle of the holiday season; it features not only all the standard natal elements, but also the ongoing and age-old battle of the Christians versus the Jews, which oddly turns out to be among the battles of my biological origins.
    December, the season of joy, is the season of my secret sorrows.
    Every year I cannot help but think of the woman who gave me away. I find myself missing someone I never knew, wondering, Does she miss me? Does she shop for the things I buy myself? Does my father know I exist? Do I have siblings? Does anybody know who I am? I spend weeks grieving.
    At this point it would take nothing short of a national monthlong festival, a public parade celebrating my existence, to reassure me that my presence on this planet is welcome. And even then I’m not sure I would believe it, I’m not sure I wouldn’t doubt that it was an attempt to humor me, to temporarily cajole me out of a black hole.
    And this year is something entirely new, more awful, like going back to scratch and starting all over again, a new birthday with an old child, the first with four parents instead of two, a schizoid dividing of the zygote further than the gods intended it to go.
    Everyone is at me, wanting something.
    My parents, who usually do nothing, are trying to plan a trip to New York. I quickly put them off.
    And Ellen is calling me every night begging that she be allowed to see me, feeling that in some way this is her birthday too.
    â€œIt’s your birthday,” she says. “Please, pretty please.” And she starts to cry, and then there is the click of the lighter and “Can you hold on for a minute while I get a drink of water?”
    She writes a letter saying that Decembers have plagued her for the last thirty-one years, she finds them excruciating, depressing, and so forth. And while it’s nice to know I was never forgotten, it’s stranger still that I am never known.
    Norman calls asking if I’ve “got any big