CRITIC'S CHOICE
Growing up in Washington, D.C., novelist Homes writes in her riveting new memoir, she imagined her birth parents were Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag. The truth—she was the product of an affair between a businessman and his teen employee, a lost, unbalanced soul who was later convicted of mortgage fraud—was more disturbing. Now 45, the author of The End of Alice and This Book Will Save Your Life talked to PEOPLE's Nina Burleigh in New York City about her new memoir, The Mistress's Daughter.
How did you meet your birth parents? My mother wrote me a letter in 1993; I wrote back and then called her. I could tell the minute I called she wanted something. She wanted to come to New York the next day. She asked if I would adopt her. There is a huge difference between wanting to know your child is okay and stalking that child. I was afraid of her.
And your father? I wrote him. We met and he told me his wife insisted we take a DNA test. We did, but he wouldn't tell me the results. We're no longer in contact.
He tells PEOPLE he's not your father. That's sad. I would like to think I would be a person parents would be proud of.
Did you stay in contact with your mother? I saw her twice before she died in 1998. I felt badly when she died. If she hadn't terrified me so much, she would have been quite a character to spend time with.
Do you wish you hadn't met them? As I say in my book, I couldn't not know.
My mother wrote me a letter in 1993; I wrote back and then called her. I could tell the minute I called she wanted something. She wanted to come to New York the next day. She asked if I would adopt her. There is a huge difference between wanting to know your child is okay and stalking that child. I was afraid of her.
I wrote him. We met and he told me his wife insisted we take a DNA test. We did, but he wouldn't tell me the results. We're no longer in contact.
That's sad. I would like to think I would be a person parents would be proud of.
I saw her twice before she died in 1998. I felt badly when she died. If she hadn't terrified me so much, she would have been quite a character to spend time with.
As I say in my book, I couldn't not know.
By Tracy Chevalier
REVIEWED BY FRANCINE PROSE
NOVEL
It's quite a happy coincidence that Tracy Chevalier's characters so often find themselves living close to the art geniuses of the past. In her new novel, Burning Bright, the author of 2000's Girl with the Pearl Earring takes us to London in the 1790s, where young Jem Kellaway—whose family used to live in the countryside in Dorsetshire—has moved next door to none other than the painter, poet, printer and political radical William Blake.
Jem and his feisty friend Maggie Butterfield, the adventure-hungry daughter of the neighborhood outcast, make lively companions—and the duo eventually befriend Blake, inspiring him to write the English lit classic Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
As always, Chevalier has a knack for re-creating the sights, attitudes and spirit of a historical period. But William Blake is so much more interesting than anything else in the novel that you may find yourself skimming for the parts in which he appears—or, better yet, reaching for Peter Ackroyd's biography of this brilliant and eccentric British artist.
By Larry Brown
FICTION
Brown once said that his idea of plot was to "get my hero in a whole heap of trouble—and then get him out." Watching him derail his characters' lives and get them back on track is one of the many pleasures of Miracle, the novel Brown was working on when he died suddenly at age 53 in 2004. To say the story is about a rural community and a very special catfish gives just a hint—the book is brimming with humor and sympathy for the hardscrabble lives of ordinary people. The only flaw is that it's the last Larry Brown novel we'll be lucky enough to read.
"If I had grown up with my birth mother, I would never have survived"
With his gorgeously photographed new book and Planet Earth TV series, airing on the Discovery Channel starting March 25, BBC producer Alastair Fothergill aims to raise awareness about the natural world. "It's fragile," he says, "but it's still there. And how can anybody care about, say, a snow leopard if they've never seen one?"
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
