Moms de Plume

The Ellen-and-Norman story that Homes pieced together was filled with melodrama and pathos, and she ended up parsing competing versions. For example: Norman and his wife wanted to adopt her, he said, but Ellen nixed the idea. No way, said Ellen angrily: "He never even suggested it."

They agreed on one thing, at least. She told him she was pregnant on the day his mother died.

Norman asked Homes to take a DNA test -- it was his wife's idea, he said -- before he introduced her to her four half siblings. She showed up wearing linen pants and a blouse. When the test was finished, he said, "I would have liked to take you for a nice lunch if you'd worn something better."

Things went downhill from there, though it took a while. He told her the DNA test showed a 99.9 percent chance that he was her father. He introduced her to one of his sons, Norman Hecht Jr., but not to his other children. He arranged for her to meet his wife -- who, not surprisingly, didn't take much of a shine to the mistress's daughter. Eventually, though no one was suing anyone, he and Homes started communicating through lawyers.

After Ellen died, Homes went through her apartment and packed up four boxes of documents. She couldn't bear to go through them, so she marked them "Dead Ellen 1-4" and put them in a storage unit. When she finally opened them, they proved to contain more questions than answers.

Are you you?

Trying to fill out a dead-ended story, Homes found herself tracing her newly discovered ancestors in archives and through the Internet. Otherwise favorable reviews have suggested strongly that her chapter on Googling up a family portrait might be of less interest to readers than to the obsessed author.

As she wrote, she found herself employing a couple of fictional devices, which she was careful to label as such.

In a section called "Imagining My Mother," she tried to fill the gaps left by Ellen's death and by the fact that she'd never been "a very good reporter of her own life" anyway. As for Norman's side of the narrative, Homes constructed an angry, imaginary deposition filled with questions she'd like her birth father to answer. She called it "Like an Episode of 'L.A. Law.' "

Would you describe yourself as a family man? . . .

When your sexual relationship with Ms. Ballman began, how old was she? . . .

Did you have Ms. Ballman meet with you and your lawyer and together discuss the fact that "there are only so many slices of the pie"?

"I'm sorry, but he's not available," says a woman who answers the phone at Norman Hecht's current residence in the Washington suburbs, making it clear that he never will be and hanging up without identifying herself.

"Two words: No comment," says Norman Hecht Jr., also reached by phone. Asked if that is his father's policy as well, he adds: "He's 82, he has Alzheimer's. He's out of that game, okay?"

Suffice it to say that in the end, nobody involved came close to getting what they wanted from this reunion of parents and child.

Nature and Nurture

And yet: While Homes didn't get what she wanted, she just may have gotten some of what she needs.

For one thing, she has a new perspective on the parents she grew up with. "Tell me about your people," Norman asked her at one point. "My people are lovely," she shot back. "You couldn't ask for better."

Their connection has never been that simple, of course. When it is suggested to Phyllis Homes that being the parent of a writer isn't always easy, she bursts out laughing, then agrees. But of her daughter's new book she says, "I love it. I think it's the best thing she's written so far," and of the daughter herself, "We are terrifically proud of her."

For another thing, Homes has gotten more comfortable with her existential status as an unusually complex amalgam of nature and nurture. Her mental hard drive has in fact expanded, allowing her "to tolerate simultaneously a lot of contradictions and just accept that yes, it's contradictory."

The last chapter of "The Mistress's Daughter" attempts to acknowledge and resolve some of those contradictions. It does so by paying tribute to two of the people who've been at the center of her amalgamated life.

The first is a beloved grandmother from the family that adopted her. The second is her 4-year-old daughter, Juliet, conceived after her grandmother's death in part because "my family was shrinking and I thought: I don't want to be the only one left here."

Juliet, as Homes points out, is the only biological relative with whom she has ever lived.

This could be a subject for a whole other memoir, if it weren't for the obvious privacy concerns. But never mind that. She's a fiction writer! She can't wait to get back to inventing unreal worlds.

"This reality thing is painful and overrated," she says.