An acclaimed novelist's memoir about what it means to be adopted and how all of us construct our sense of self and family. Before A.M. Homes was born, she was put up for adoption. Her birth mother was a 22-year-old single woman having an affair with a much older married man. Thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her. Homes, renowned for the psychological accuracy and intensity of her storytelling, tells how they made contact with her, what happened next, and what she was able to reconstruct about the story of their lives. Her birth mother, a complex and lonely woman, never married or had another child, and died in 1998. Years later, Homes opened boxes of her mother's memorabilia, hoping to know her secrets, but no relief came. She then became obsessed with finding out as much as she could about all four parents and their families.—From publisher description.A woman who was adopted as a newborn recounts her experience of meeting her birth parents, describing how adoption affected her sense of identity, and her efforts to learn more about her birth mother after her death.