Moms de Plume

One came from her adoption, about which she never quite got the full story. (At first, she was told it had been arranged, not privately but through the Jewish Social Service Agency.) The second was cast by the 9-year-old boy who would have been her brother if he hadn't died, from kidney disease, six months before she was adopted.

She couldn't help seeing herself as an outsider who could never fill the lost boy's empty shoes. She felt "that something huge had happened before I got there and that everybody was forever in the process of recovering from it and not particularly talking about it."

She and her surviving older brother took to playing funeral parlor, sprinkling the designated corpse with talcum powder. She found herself drawn to spend hours a day with a neighbor whose husband had just died.

As Homes got older, she discovered rock-and-roll. "I wanted to be in the Rolling Stones," she says, laughing, but rock was too high-risk and exposed, especially for young women in those days. Writing was a better fit.

It's "a very good way for a shy person to reach out to other people, because you don't have to do it in person," she explains.

When she was 19, a play she'd written won a competition that led to a production in Washington. That same year she wrote her first novel, "Jack," narrated by a boy who learns that his father is gay. It would be published in 1989 and would be followed, in 1990, by a much lauded collection of stories, "The Safety of Objects."

She published under the initials "A.M.," which she'd used on her school papers for years. "I thought: I like the space between A.M. Homes and who I am," she says. Interviewers would try to intrude, but it seemed important not to let that space disappear.

Ever since "Jack," people have been asking Homes if she is gay. "And I would say, 'I've dated men and I've dated women and there's no more or less to it than that,' " she says. "I mean, there really isn't!" For that matter, Homes asks why it is that when journalists interview a female writer, as she recalls poet Sharon Olds pointing out, "they ask either what she's cooking for dinner or all about her family."

Fair enough. Yet this line of argument raises an obvious question: How did the woman who says, convincingly, that "I am, and apparently always have been, this very private person" come to write something as personal and revealing as "The Mistress's Daughter"?

The simple answer: What happened when her birth parents showed up felt so surreal that, to make sense of the experience, she had to start taking notes.

"I felt like I needed a larger hard drive in my head," she says. "Because the hard drive that we have has two slots. It has a mother and a father slot. It doesn't have slots for extras."

'You Should Adopt Me'

"In my dreams, my birth mother is a goddess, the queen of queens," Homes writes. "Movie-star beautiful, incredibly competent, she can take care of anyone and anything."