May 2006

Michael Schaub

features

An Interview with A.M. Homes

There’s never been anyone like A. M. Homes in American literature before, and there almost certainly never will be. Born in Washington, D.C., she wrote her first novel, the sweet, hilarious Jack, as a teenager. First published in 1989, the book, about a teenage boy whose father comes out as gay, has remained in print and is still a fixture on high school reading lists in America and Europe. Homes followed the novel up with an unbelievably original collection of short stories, The Safety of Objects, in 1991. (It was adapted into a movie by Rose Troche ten years later.) Safety contains two of Homes’ most famously shocking stories -- “A Real Doll,” about a teenager who has a sexual relationship with his sister’s Barbie toy, and “Adults Alone,” which dealt with a suburban couple trying crack cocaine for the first time. (She later expanded “Adults Alone” into a novel, the 1998 book Music for Torching.) As bold as the collection was, it didn’t quite prepare the reading public for her 1996 novel The End of Alice, about the correspondence between a convicted pedophile murderer and a female college student with a sexual attraction toward a young boy. Brilliant, unsparing, and unsettlingly graphic, the novel quickly became infamous in America and in the UK, where a children's’ charity, missing the point completely, attempted (unsuccessfully) to ban it. Also the author of the novel In a Country of Mothers, the short story collection Things You Should Know, and the nonfiction book Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill, she currently lives in New York. Most recently, she’s written for the Showtime television show The L Word, and her latest novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, was just released by Viking. It’s an excellent novel, both dark and hopeful, about a Los Angeles businessman forced to confront the relationships and people he’s neglected, after experiencing a sudden, violent attack of unidentifiable pain. The book has drawn great reviews from many American critics, and a harsh attack from increasingly irrelevant New York Times hitwoman Michiko Kakutani. (It’s also inspired some rock-stupid leads by book reviewers who should know better -- see The Washington Post. Or better yet, don’t.) Next year, Homes will release a memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter. A. M. Homes talked to Bookslut via telephone, on her way to a bookstore in Los Angeles.

Do you enjoy L.A.? Do you like living there?

Well, I don’t live here. I enjoy visiting here. I find it a very... odd city, a city that has an incredible depth of culture that’s not obvious on the surface. There are incredibly diverse groups of people living here.

Is it the polar opposite of New York, or just different in some ways?

Well, technically, it’s the opposite. But I think one of the things that interests me is that it’s so odd-looking. I mean, there’s palm trees and greenery, and all year round, things are in bloom. People talk so much about how they love it because of the weather, and they have this apocalyptic, weird weather. Like today, it’s cold and dark here. And they don’t ever let on that the weather is strange. I find it very surrealistic, in a way, very American -- kind of what’s left of the American dream. But I don’t think I could live here.

You’re there on a book tour?

Yeah, I just got in today. I’ve been to -- I don’t know how many bookstores today already.

Are the book tours pretty awkward for you?

Well, the funny thing is, I’ve been doing it for so long, I feel like I can sticker the books, I can do the whole thing. And inevitably, someone will come up to me and say, “Where’s the new Tom Clancy book?” And I’ll say, “It’s right over there.” It happened to me this afternoon already. I was in Barnes & Noble, and a guy came up and asked me some question, and I answered the question, and said, “You know, I don’t really work here.” It’s so funny -- people will say, “You’re a writer? And you got published?” It’s weird. You’re an observer in your own life. It’s interesting to see what people say and do -- you don’t want to blow your cover. It’s weird. Whenever I’m in foreign cities, people always ask me for directions. Wherever I am, people think I’m from there.

Are you doing any work on the show while you’re there?

Oh, The L Word? I’m not working on The L Word anymore. I had a very good time doing it; I liked it, actually, a lot. It was fun to work in TV, I’d never done that. And honestly, I hadn’t had a job since I was twenty-something years old. I was really nervous about it, because not only had I not had a job in a long time, but this was in a medium that I didn’t know how to do. But it was enormous amounts of fun; the ratings doubled while I was working on the show. It’s something I would love to do again, but I’m not doing it this season. It’s so different than (writing) a novel; it’s a much faster medium. And you don’t have the investment of a novel, because it’s not your heart. You’re just making pretty girls talk, you know?

Was it kind of a “writing by committee” thing?

It sort of is writing by committee, but what I was doing was generating a lot of character stuff and storylines for them. It’s sort of like sitting around, talking about what might happen to (the characters). It’s not like writing a novel where you sit by yourself for four years. With this, you sit in a room twelve hours a day for three weeks, and you just make up stuff out loud. I had them bring in a writer named Adam Rapp next year, a playwright who I admire a lot. And that was a lot of fun, working with him.

That guy’s amazing.

Yeah. You know, my mandate was, it’s a lesbian show -- let’s make it straight. Bring in the straight guy.

[Laughs] Well, you know, heterosexuals are so unfairly underrepresented on TV these days.

Yeah, exactly! You know, I have to say, I don’t like anything that’s too particularly “(you have to be) one way or the other” anyway. I just don’t think life is like that.

It kind of seems like there’s not much ambiguity on TV these days, with shows like The L Word being the exception.

Yeah. Everybody loves Raymond!

[Laughs] Oh, don’t we, though.

Yeah, exactly.

Do you watch any television?

No. [Laughs] I don’t have time to watch television. If there’s a disaster, I watch it. Or in the middle of the night, if I’m not feeling well. I’ll watch CNN or something. But I don’t know any television schedules, I don’t know what’s on. I’m just too busy, honestly.

Yeah, I could see that. And that’s probably a good thing.

Oh, it’s fine. There’s too many other things I want to do to just sit there and watch TV. I don’t like watching movies at home, either. I like going to movies. I want to sit in a theater with other people and sort of have the experience.

Did you have any involvement with the adaptation of The Safety of Objects?

No, I didn’t. Rose Troche told me she wanted to make a movie of the book, and I said “Good luck.” It was just one of those things -- the reality of making a film out of a collection of stories, there’s just a small chance of that happening. I talked to her at various points along the way, but I felt that my role was just to be supportive and let her make the film she wanted to make. And she made a film that is different from the stories. (The project) had a very high degree of difficulty. Film is film, and a book is a book, and they’re not the same, and that’s OK. It was a big step forward for her in her career.

Let me ask you about the new book. Somehow I got the impression -- I don’t know why -- that it must have taken a really long time to write. Is that true?

Yeah! It is true. I started the research for it -- I don’t even know how long ago. National Geographic said “We’ll send you anywhere in the world you want to go, if you write a travel memoir about it.” I said, “I’ll go to Los Angeles, and I’ll live in the Chateau Marmont.” I wanted to write a novel about L.A., but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to afford to get myself out here for very long. I thought it would really prompt me, by having to write a book about Los Angeles, to explore in a different kind of way, in a much more anthropological, journalistic way. That book [Los Angeles] came out in 2002, and I’d started the research in 2000 or 2001. So yeah, it took me a while. It always does.

Do you find when you’re working on collections of short stories, it takes that long?

I write short stories kind of between things, not because in any way they’re lesser than [novels]. You can’t sit down and say, “I’m going to write a collection of short stories.” They’re very distilled. Like the story about the Reagans [“The Former First Lady and the Football Hero,” in Things You Should Know], I had the idea for a very long time. But it can take me about ten years to pull together a group of short stories that feels like a collection.

Does it ever happen that you find yourself writing a short story that becomes a novel?

Well, on the one hand, I say “I don’t approve of that,” but on the other hand, yeah. Music for Torching I wrote as a short story. They burned down their house, and that was sort of the end of the story. And I kept going, and I remember thinking to myself, “What are you doing?” A story is a story, and a novel is a novel, and they really have different rules, in some ways. But it just kept going, and I thought, “Fine,” but what happens when you burn down someone’s house on page 30? Where do you go after that? And that, in some ways, was the biggest challenge. How do you keep it moving forward? Once I thought about that, it became kind of an “everything but the kitchen sink” book, where you’re constantly adding something on top of it, which I think is reflective of what many people’s lives are like. You have a lot on your plate, and more falls onto your plate.

That reminds me of the first scene in This Book Will Save Your Life, where [Richard Novak, the protagonist, is] going through this almost panic attack. That strikes me as being such a difficult thing to write about -- it’s difficult to read, and difficult to go through, obviously. Was that more emotionally draining than writing the other scenes?

No. It’s all emotionally draining. [Laughs] When you start a book, there is both a great amount of “I don’t know” about the characters and the whole thing, but there’s also an incredible amount of hope and optimism for what that book might be, even if it’s a very dark book, you still have great hope for it. I think one of the things that’s very important, whether you’re starting either a novel or a short story, is the angle of attack, or the note that you start off on, which then kind of commands, almost like in a musical structure, how things go after that. I feel like that note has to be strong. I worked hard on that attack to make it something that the reader can feel, that’s not dismissible -- “Oh, he’s having a panic attack, he’s faking it.” It has to be something that causes tension in the reader as they’re reading it. Somebody was saying to me the other night, at one of the readings, “Have you ever been in that much pain?” People always want to know, did it happen to you? And I’m like, “Well, no, I really work from imagination, but I have a very good imagination.” It’s that ability to sort of crawl inside something and push out the edges of it, to take it somewhere in a little bit more... like the Kodacolor version of it. I want it to be funny, and I want it to be serious, but I also want it to have an intensity to it. It doesn’t just imitate everyday life, it’s kind of beyond that.

People do seem to have trouble with the idea of fiction; it’s like they think it has to have happened to the author.

It’s something that’s changed a lot over the years. There really almost is no sense anymore that there is such a thing as fiction. People will ask what you’re writing, and you’ll say “It’s a novel.” [And they say] “So it’s all true?” I saw -- I taught for a very long time -- people have lost access to their imaginations. It doesn’t occur to people anymore that you can, in fact, make up people who never existed, make up situations, and that they feel plausible, they feel real.

I don’t know if you saw this with your students, but do you feel that a lot of younger writers are only writing about things they’ve experienced, and only writing about people who are just like them?

Yeah. I think it’s a problem. I think there’s something about the kind of academic system that just kind of blocks the creative impulse. But I also think, unfortunately, there’s this dull literalness to the culture. I think we’ve become fact-obsessed; we’re kind of comforted by facts and information. And now between reality TV and the faux memoir, we’ve lost track of what actual nonfictional reality actually is. It’s really a very blurry time.

When you published Jack, were there people asking you “So what’s it like to have a gay father?”

When I published Jack, my dad, who is not gay and is still married to my mom, was mortified. But no one really came out and said, “So, how is your gay father?” When The End of Alice came out, I went around and talked to a lot of publishers, who were very nervous about it. And I think part of what they wanted to do, in a funny way, was to make sure that it wasn’t real. They were so worried that they’d send me on the road, and I’d crack. It’s a scary book, but people were kind of baffled by it. It’s one of the few times where, for the lack of a better word, you hear the voice of someone who’s a pedophile and a murderer. It’s a voice that’s not really represented anywhere. I wanted to try to capture it, in part to give people something to respond to. I think it’s very terrifying and discomfiting, which is fine. It’s hard for people to believe that somebody can write that, and not be that. It’s like what Bret Ellis ran into with American Psycho. People assumed that that had to be Bret Ellis. In my case, they thought it was really weird, because it’s a woman. “How is that even possible?”

Do you think Nabokov had the same thing happen to him when Lolita came out?

I don’t know. I wonder about that, sort of. I don’t know. I don’t know. Someone once gave me The New York Times reviews of Lolita, and they were truly godawful. And I found that kind of heartwarming.

Well, The New York Times...yeah, I...uh...[Laughs]

[Laughs] Oh, The New York Times.

Yeah, that’s pretty much all you can say. It seems like they really have less and less of an idea of what they’re talking about.

That seems to be the consensus, especially lately. My feeling is, there’s not that many people buying books, and you don’t have to discourage them from buying books. If you don’t like a book, you can [choose to] not review it. It’s frustrating to have to deal with the response and the fallout. At the same time, that being said, I think there are what I would call “good bad reviews,” really well-thought-out reviews of a book that are negative. It’s legitimate to have a bad review. But I think there are other things that are just kind of crazy. I think I must have somehow done something to Michiko Kakutani. Maybe I was in the grocery store one day, and I cut in line in front of her and didn’t know it. I’ve never met her. I have no idea what her problem is. She definitely seems to think I’m godawful. [Laughs]

You and Philip Roth.

I know! It’s one of those funny things. What did I do? Whatever.

I’m not sure she really likes reading.

I’m not sure she does either. I feel bad for her. She must not be happy. Truthfully, it doesn’t feel -- the reviews she’s written, not just of my book -- it doesn’t feel like they come from a person who’s feeling good about things.

Do you think this is the type of book where some people just don’t get it? Is there a type of person who’s maybe predisposed to really understand it?

I wouldn’t have thought that until very recently. I thought it was a kind of book that had a very broad appeal. I thought it could work for a lot of people. But it does seem like some of the people have truly not gotten it. It seems to me sometimes -- younger women reviewers, maybe they just don’t understand this guy, who he is. It’s funny to say; I almost think it’s as though they hate men. It’s like they’re so mad at this middle-aged guy who’s freaking out, that they can’t bear it. They’re dismissing him, and I think they don’t know him in some way. I’ve written other books where I kind of expected a very intensive negative reaction. And it sounds silly to say, but this book was written with incredibly good intentions, and wanting people to be uplifted a bit, and inspired, and think about how they can make a difference in their own lives, and other people’s lives. And then people are like, “I hate this book!” I don’t know. I’m a little confused at the moment.

You’ve written, obviously, from the point of view of male characters before. Do people express surprise at that, like “How do you know what it’s like?”

They ask me about that. And honestly, when we got this nod from Stephen King, one of the things I liked most about that was that he’s a guy about the same age as the guy in the book. So the fact that it resonated with him really meant something to me, because it meant that it worked for a guy, that he didn’t say that I was faking it, or I just didn’t get it. Again, that goes back to the whole notion of really writing fiction, and trying to think about people who are not me. I’m not interested in writing about myself. Although next year I have this memoir coming out, but I’d say even within that, my interest is so not -- I mean, I’m embarrassed to write about me.

Yeah. Again, I somehow went ahead and did it, thinking “I hope this has some import for other people,” and that people would read it and feel differently about their own experiences, and that it carries some resonance for them. I think it was in some ways sort of useful for me to organize my thoughts about that experience, but it honestly was not in any way cathartic or anything. I don’t want to do that again. [Laughs]