The Mistress's Daughter is the first work of nonfiction by novelist A.M. Homes. Now out in paperback, the book is an enthralling account of her attempts to reckon with her biological parents, who met when her father was a married businessman and her mother was his teenage employee. Homes approaches her story in a variety of ways, including straight memoir, genealogy, fictional episodes, and even a deposition. She spoke with Boldtype's Toby Warner about the challenges she faced — from her own distaste for memoirs to an overeager New Yorker fact-checker.

BT: How did the project that led to this book begin?

AMH: After my biological parents returned to my life, I don't think I had a choice about writing their story down. That's my way of dealing with information. I hadn't written autobiographically before this book, and I don't really keep journals, but I have always taken notes on things. As this was happening, I just thought it was so strange, and I knew I had to make a shoebox gesture — to organize this information and put it in a box. I wanted to hold the pieces in place for a while to get used to them. A box is also like a book — something that would hold everything together.

BT: There's a section where you describe going through the boxes of your biological mother's belongings after her death. Did being a fiction writer help you at all when you wanted to compose a story from those belongings?

AMH: I feel like her belongings contained much less than I thought they would. I really hoped that they would let me get to know my biological mother in some way. What they did tell me was that her life was really tragic, that she struggled with things that were complex, and that the adults who should have helped her didn't. It didn't really help me to construct the narrative, though. What would have been helpful from either parent would be to have heard them tell the stories of their lives. But that never happened.

BT: How was the experience of writing this book different from writing fiction?

AMH: There's such relief and pleasure in going into a world of fiction. You're able to leave the troubles of this world. Even though I write about complex, troubled people, they're not me. Unlike some memoirists who haven't been entirely true, I'm very aware of the differences between fact and fiction. When I'm writing fiction, I know where the little threads are. If it's from something in real life, I know where it came from.

BT: In the book, you're very careful to highlight what you don't have and what you don't know.

AMH: Exactly. It shocks me that people can write something and claim that they didn't know they were writing fiction. I very much wanted it to be clear when I was imagining a piece of this book. We're living in a weird time. I don't know if it's the conflation of reality TV with therapy and confessional culture, but people don't know the difference between fiction and nonfiction anymore. I think it's just shocking. Take the woman who wrote the gang memoir that turned out not to be true — why wouldn't it have been good enough to just say she wrote a novel? You have political candidates who misremember where they were. I'm waiting for the person to say that they were at some event when they hadn't even been born yet.

BT: Were there facts that you were tempted to leave out?

AMH: When I first started writing it, I thought my commitment to the story should not be dependent on exposing people, so I changed their names. But after I had done so much genealogical research, I realized that to change the names would really be to change history. I also realized that by changing the names, I was also saying that there was something that should be hidden here, that there was something to be ashamed of, and I would have been colluding with whatever shame had been associated with adoption for generations. Using real names felt like the only — and I hesitate to use this word — "legitimate" thing to do.

BT: As you mention in the book, it was the New Yorker's thorough fact-checking policy that precipitated the crisis over whether to use real names. They actually refused to publish an earlier version of this story, right?

AMH: I had a New Yorker contract for the piece for about seven years before I gave it to the magazine. I worked on the piece for so long that the New Yorker switched editors, and no one even really remembered that I had the contract.

BT: Did you always know that you would publish this as a book?

AMH: Yes, I always knew that it was going to be a book. But what really made me want to finish the book, no matter how excruciatingly painful it became, was the hope that it would have meaning for other people.

BT: Has that played out?

AMH: It has. I felt that adoption as a subject and an experience hadn't really been well articulated. We don't have a good language for the kinds of emotional issues it raises. But regardless of whether or not they were adopted, people are finding themselves in these pages. Everyone asks themselves, "Who am I in relation to my family?" We all hang a lot of ourselves on a narrative thread that says, "Mom and Dad met here. Grandma and Grandpa believed in this." That thread is a story, but one that often has rips and tears in it. Yet we cling to such stories in a surprisingly intense way. When they're shown to be untrue, all of a sudden the whole fabric of our lives changes. This is not just in the case of adoption, but also when people find out that a parent had a second family somewhere else, or that a grandparent spent time in jail. It's been fascinating to hear people's reactions to this book.

BT: What have some of those reactions been?

AMH: After I wrote this book, friends would warn me to be careful. They were worried people would come up to me on book tours, to confess things, or demand something from me. I have to say, though, in some ways it's been very moving. A guy came up to me in the Midwest and told me that his 80-year-old wife wants to know how to find her family. I just thought, "Oh no, she's never going to find them." But I also thought, "She's obviously lived with this for a long time." It's remarkable how personal such sharing can be and how defining it's been in people's lives. I feel lucky. I have a big life, and this is just a piece of it. It's not an obsession, or something I chew on all the time. Even though people relate to the fiction, it's not quite as intimate or personal when you get out there and start meeting people. It's amazing to find that people are either challenged or comforted by what you've done.

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