A.M. Homes

A.M. Homes (born December 18, 1961, Washington, D.C., U.S.) American novelist and short-story writer known for her transgressive and darkly humorous explorations of American suburbia.

Homes, who was adopted, was raised in Chevy Chase, Maryland, by an artist father and guidance counselor mother. Encouraged by her parents and by her own social alienation, she began writing as a child, experimenting with poetry and corresponding with public figures whom she admired. While taking classes at American University, Washington, D.C., she wrote a play, The Call-In Hour (1982), which was initially predicated on the idea that Holden Caulfield of J.D. Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye was a real person. It was staged in Washington, but only after she changed the names of the main characters; Salinger’s lawyers had sent the producers a cease-and-desist notice asking them to refrain from using Salinger’s intellectual property. Homes ultimately graduated from Sarah Lawrence College (B.A., 1985) and from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop (M.F.A., 1988).

Homes’s debut novel—Jack (1989; television film 2004), written while she was still a student—concerns a teenager whose father reveals that he is homosexual. The story, lauded for its acutely realized characterizations and humane treatment of its subject matter, was widely translated and used in high-school curricula. In The Safety of Objects (1990; film 2001), a collection of short fiction, Homes took a scalpel to the complacent pretensions obscuring the deviance and malaise permeating suburban America. Through piquant use of detail, she satirized the behaviour of its denizens in stories such as “Adults Alone,” which features two bored parents experimenting with crack cocaine, and “A Real Doll,” a surreal tale of a teenage boy’s sexual experimentation with a talking Barbie doll (and her decapitated mate).

Homes’s preoccupation with the violation of boundaries pervaded her ensuing work. The novel In a Country of Mothers (1993) documents the professional transgressions of a therapist who becomes increasingly convinced that one of her patients is the daughter whom she had given up for adoption. She investigated the machinations of the pedophiliac mind in The End of Alice (1996), which polarized critics with its depictions of sexual violence. The novel was accompanied by an art book, Appendix A:, ostensibly a catalog of items amassed by its disturbed narrator. Music for Torching (1999) features the disaffected protagonists from “Adults Alone” wreaking further havoc. Things You Should Know (2002), a second collection of short fiction, further mined middle-class America for black humour and insight.

This Book Will Save Your Life (2006) marked a shift in tone for Homes. Though retaining the wry observations and sense of the surreal that were her bailiwick, the novel, an ultimately redemptive tale about a stockbroker undergoing an existential crisis in Los Angeles, largely eschews the amused nihilism that characterizes her earlier work. May We Be Forgiven (2012), concerning a man who insinuates himself into the life of his more-successful brother following a series of tragedies, leavens a bleak view of human nature with the possibility of atonement. The novel won the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Days of Awe (2018) is another short-story collection. In 2022 Homes published her first novel in 10 years, The Unfolding. A political satire, it centres on a Republican who is upset that Democrat Barack Obama was elected president of the United States.

Homes chronicled her ultimately abortive efforts to reconnect with her birth mother and father in the memoir The Mistress’s Daughter (2007). Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill (2002), commissioned by the National Geographic Society, is a meditation on the titular city. She also wrote several episodes of the cable television series The L Word and regularly contributed to the periodicals The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

Homes was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1995 and a Guggenheim fellowship in 1998. She taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Princeton, and from 2013 to 2018 she cochaired the board of Yaddo, an artists’ community.