When it comes to writers, there’s nothing I like better than an all consuming relationship – a bit of serial monogamy, so to speak, where I read one book after another (not in chronological order, as that would be obsessive, no?) augmented by a little bit of background late-night googling, especially if we aren’t getting along too well. My latest attachment is the dazzlingly gifted, at times exasperating and occasionally very troubling writer A.M. Homes.

Born in Washington DC in 1961, Homes is a novelist, short-story writer, journalist, memoir writer and has a whole host of awards and achievements. She is also a television writer and producer for the L Word (writer for Series 2 and producer for Series 3) and at this point I should confess to Gaelick readers that I don’t watch the show – having dabbled and found it a tad fluffy – but before you take away my lesbian passport, given that Homes is involved, I might give it a second chance! (Especially after reading Orange’s summary… ) according to DIVA magazine, Homes enjoyed every L-Word minute

‘I had a great time doing it. It was such fun to work in television; I’d never done it before. I was so nervous before I started, because I hadn’t had a job since I was twenty-something years old, and also because I wasn’t at all familiar with writing for that medium.’

I got interested in Homes from an article in the New Yorker which was the basis of her recent memoir about her adoption The Mistress’s Daughter - as I loved the brutally funny and detached way she described meeting with her birthmother and birthfather. The book charts an extraordinary emotional journey, as Homes has utterly bizarre encounters with these ‘parents’ who are total strangers.

    “The return of my biological family was traumatic—paralyzing—and I just wanted to capture  the events without processing or analysis, to deliver the story back to myself, as though by writing it down, it would begin to make sense.”

Her birthmother turns out to be a troubled, unstable and insecure woman who, with an irony that escaped her, wanted Homes to take care of her and when that wasn’t happening stalked her by showing up at a public reading to introduce herself.  Her birthfather behaves as if he is having an illicit affair, and told the mid 30s writer in her linen trousers that she had not dressed nicely enough to be brought to lunch, on the day he took her for a DNA test!  This is fascinating and brilliantly researched piece of autobiography. Homes’ style is at times terrifyingly clinical and yet she allows the shocking humour of the situation to surface. 

Her most recent novel is the deservingly popular This Book Will Save Your Life -  a searing satire on LA and the vanity and vacuousness of modern living, US style. The central character is 50-something successful trader called Richard Novak who hits a psychosomatic health crisis, despite his personal trainer
and macrobiotic eating habits.  There are layers and layers of irony at play here- and a giant doughnut metaphor thoughout – the hole at the centre, symbolic of Richard’s (and Homer Simpson’s and America’s) great spiritual void. Richard craves doughnuts and builds his first ‘real’ relationship with an immigrant doughnut shop-owner, Anhil- and their friendship and the greasy carb pleasures bring him closer to his own humanity.  You’re never sure just how much Homes is toying with you, which I like- on the one hand she’s attacking the self-help culture, yet she titles her book as something you’d find in a Mind Body Spirit shelf - seeking out the very readers that you would imagine her to be scathing of – and is at times she as sympathetic as she is scathing toward her protagonist. It very likely won’t save your life, but it may well rekindle your interest in American fiction! I’d recommend it to anyone who likes their humour a little black.

Next up I read her her first novel Jack, written when she was only 19. It is a warm and often kindly (though never mawkish or sentimental) account of a teen boy coming to terms with the fact that his father is gay. The layers of cynicism and ironies are less evident in the fresh Homes, and her characterisation and obvious empathy for the teen boy is spot on. Interestingly, given Jack and Richard Novak, she seems far more at home with male characters.

I can safely say that her novel The End of Alice (first published in the US in 1996) is the most disturbing and at times nausiating novels I have ever read (and I’ve read a lot of edgy fiction!) The plot centres around a correspondance between a convicted, imprisoned paedophile and a ‘fan’ of his- a 19 year old young woman who harbour fantasies about raping/molesting a young boy. There are many, many nods Nabokov’s Lolita in the style, cleverness of the narrative twists and the general uravelling of the plot into crazed mind of the narrator, so you really aren’t sure what is ‘real’.  I suspect I’d have abandoned it, as I found it very disturbing, nasty and relentless sordid , but as I’d come to enjoy – and trust- Homes as a writer with the other books,  I stuck with it. The book caused a bit of an outcry, although termed “exhilaratingly perverse”  by the New York Times Book Review, the  UK National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children called it ‘debasing and repugnant’ . It was banned by WH Smith in the UK and translations that were planned were cancelled.  In an early interview for Powells, she describes the book:

With Alice, I wanted to write a book where people, at times, would be very drawn into it, seduced by it – then on the very next page want to throw the book across the room because they’re so upset that they’ve been seduced, that they’ve been had by this guy. Then a minute or two passes and they have to get up and go get it so they can pick it up and read some more.

I like that book a lot. I feel, as a writer, that I worked incredibly hard and I did what I wanted to do. A big thing was to not shy away from the material. My responsibility is to not worry about what people are going to think, but to worry about the character and how to most accurately represent him.   

She is  serious writer, with plenty of integrity… I don’t think the book should be banned, (Down With That Sort of Thing) but for a while I wished she hadn’t written it, now I just wish I hadn’t read it! In time I’ll probably be happy to engage with it on the intellectual level she allegedly wants, rather than something that produced a retching, visceral response! 

Anyhow, one more book to mention is In the Country of Mothers… written before her memoir, it is shockingly similar. The plot is a tad complex, so here’s how her publishers describe it ;

Claire Roth, a capable, established psychotherapist with an adoring husband and children no more alienated than normal, her new patient Jody Goodman—a witty and attractive young filmmaker—is a welcome diversion from a routine at once comfortable and predictable. Jody, successful yet uncertain about living apart from her adoptive parents for the first time, is disarmed by Claire’s interest and approval. Gradually, for these two—exactly the right ages to be mother and daughter—the lines between friendship and family, between love and compulsion, begin to lose their focus.

This is the book where many of  AM Homes issues are toyed with, as is the reader, trying to figure out what is happening amid the various breakdowns (that unravelling trick yet again!)  of the central characters. This isn’t an easy book to read either, Jody has some particularly horrid heterosexual encounters and mothers come accross as fairly crazed, absent or pathological liars… still, a picnic compared to End of Alice! 

We’ve got to the very end of all this without that old bugbear of a question or comment on the writer’s sexuality- and does it matter anyway?-  For the record, Amy Michael Homes (called AM since she was a child apparently) eshews lables, though she told DIVA:

 ‘I am bisexual, but I wouldn’t necessarily define myself that way. My sense of self goes so far beyond any single word. Label, schmabel! It doesn’t begin to describe who I am. I’m a writer, a parent of a three-year-old child. Who I happen to be sleeping with is nobody’s business.’

She doesn’t seem to have a new book forthcoming yet (correct me if I’m wrong Gaelick readers!), but she is one of the contributing writers to Jeanette Winterson’s serial book 52 , which given the line up of interesting lesbian writers (Ali Smith, Jackie Kay and Winterson herself) I’ll shall be checking out soon!

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