Writer A.M. Homes Finds Humor in Unlikely Places
By Ilene Dube | Above: A.M. Homes. (Photo by Beowulf Sheehan)
In a story in A.M. Homes’ The Safety of Objects — a collection that was made into a 2001 film starring Glenn Close — the character Esther Gold tells her son, lying comatose in bed after an automobile collision, that there’s a security in feeling the worst has already happened. That robbers wouldn’t even want anything they’d touched, fearing they might catch the misfortune if they did.
How do such emotional revelations come to Homes? Is it from her experiences, or her imagination? She has written about a convicted child molester and murder; a suburban couple who deliberately burn down their house; a school shooting; even a tribe of rich conservative white men who plot to reclaim their version of democracy in the wake of Obama’s victory.
“This is a good example of the work of writing fiction,” says Homes, acting director of the Princeton University Department of Creative Writing. She created the Esther Gold character “when I was in my early 20s … (it) seems hard to fathom how I would be able to crawl inside the experience of a woman like Esther, but to me that is the most essential element. Who is Esther, what does she want? And why does she need us, the reader, to pay attention now? I don’t create emotions, I explore human behavior. Why people do what they do.”
Homes finds humor in the most unlikely places. In “Days of Awe” — a short story from a collection of the same name, which refers to the Jewish High Holy days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — two old friends and colleagues meet up at a conference on genocide. It’s where “experts in torture, politics, murder, along with neuroscientists, academics, survivors” convene trying to make sense of it all. They are handed tote bags with “genocide swag.” Across the street at another convention center is a gun show.
He is a war correspondent, she is a novelist who has written about the Holocaust, and they bond over the fact that they come from somewhere that no longer exists. They banter in character as if they are a couple from the shtetl with 10 children, the last of whom “arrived at dawn when I was having the most wonderful dream.”
It is through humor that Homes gets to the heart of it, to the ironies of our existence.
At the conference, the Holocaust novelist realizes it is Shabbos and goes to synagogue, as is her practice. “What do you mean, practice,” her mother says. “We’re Jewish, what are we practicing for? Haven’t we been through enough?”
The novelist runs into the war correspondent at the service. “I didn’t know you were Jewish,” he says to her. “I thought you were gay.”
“I thought you were married,” she retorts. Later she asks him “Why do you and I choose to live in the pain of others?”
“Because we’re most comfortable when we’re miserable,” he tells her.
When they go to bed together — later referred to as the “Shabbos lay” — he says, “you’re killing me” and she reminds him they’re at a genocide conference.
Book lovers in Princeton have likely seen Homes, 64, at the Princeton Public Library or Labyrinth Books, reading from her work or in conversation with other writers. The author of 13 books, among them the best-selling memoir The Mistress’s Daughter (about the author’s adoption, beginning with the time her birth mother tracked her down, essentially wanting to be “adopted” by her now adult daughter; and oh, could she, the daughter, also donate a kidney?); short story collections, novels, and a travel memoir, Homes also writes for film and television. She was a writer/producer of The L Word (2004-2005), wrote the adaptation of her first novel, Jack, for Showtime, and has written original television pilots for ABC, CBS, FX, and HBO. An elected member of the Writers Guild of America East Council, she was co-executive producer of the television show Falling Water and worked with David E. Kelly on the adaptation of Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes.
She writes on the arts for Art Forum, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, and The New York Times and is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Bomb, and Blind Spot. A Sarah Lawrence grad who earned an MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Homes also studied painting at the Corcoran School of Art and collaborated with Laurie Anderson on a public art project that could be seen in Times Square during the pandemic.
Collaborating with other artists, Homes writes plays and librettos, and has served on the boards of Yaddo, Poets & Writers, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Pen American Center.
Why would someone whose life was so full undertake the enormous task of directing a department at one of the most pre-eminent universities?
“I am the odd duck who loves meetings,” she says. “I grew up in a family of activists just outside of Washington, D.C., so it comes naturally to me to have meetings, to bring people together, to create community. A good day for me is one in which I get a little of my own work done — writing something creative — and where I also engage with others to do the work of making sure other writers/artists/students have what they need in order to make their work.”
Beyond the meetings, “I love process and seeing how things work. And I am just in awe of my colleagues Susan Marshall in dance, Jane Cox in theater, and Pam Lins in visual art — they are all so smart, talented, and devoted to their students. So having a chance to meet and regularly discuss things is my idea of a good time.”
“And I am a big fan of our students,” she continues. “College is not an easy time of life; one has to learn how to navigate social, cultural, personal, emotional landscapes and at the same time self-regulate, do laundry, sleep, get good grades. I think of my job as not teaching someone how to write, but more teaching or coaching someone in how to be a person, how to live a life, and if they happen to write a book, or find the cure for cancer along the way — that’s a bonus.”
The Manhattan resident who has been on the faculty since 2008 commutes to Princeton as needed. She can be seen at Small World Coffee, Jammin Crepes, Chez Alice, and Olsson’s Fine Foods. “I love Princeton,” she says. “That’s why I’m here. I am a science, history, economics fan and enjoy exploration of ideas beyond the boundaries of disciplines.”
She’s also a fan of Joyce Carol Oates. In an interview in Poets & Writers Homes named the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing (Oates retired from the University in 2014 but is still teaching) as the most underrated writer. “Joyce has been a kind of invisible mentor to me for many years: the range of her work, the scope of her imagination, everything about her is inspiring. And the one thing most people don’t know is that Joyce remembers all of her students. We can be in a meeting and a name will come up and Joyce will say, ‘Oh, they were wonderful in my class,’ and will go on to detail a story someone wrote.”
But Princeton hasn’t figured in, or inspired any places, in Homes’ fiction. “My work comes from my imagination,” says Homes, “which is frequently located in Los Angeles as I am often writing about America and the dream and reinvention and marriage/family.”
For “Written in Stone” at the Kennedy Center, A.M. Homes collaborated on a series of operatic performances of interwoven short works inspired by Washington, D.C.’s iconic monuments and the ideals embodied by President John F. Kennedy, celebrating diversity. (Photo courtesy of A.M. Homes)
While at Sarah Lawrence, Homes studied with the legendary poet, story writer, and activist Grace Paley. “Grace talked about writing “truth according to the character,” meaning not writing what you as author are thinking or wanting to say but what is accurate for the character you are writing about, organic to their experience based on their history, their economic life and what brought them to the table today. That is very important to me.”
Homes doesn’t believe characters necessarily have to be people we hold in high regard.
“There are two ideas that I struggle with in teaching and navigating today’s landscape,” she says. “One is that a character has to be likable. Why? Who said so? That is a very modern idea and just not true. We don’t read Crime and Punishment and think we can’t wait to have dinner with that guy. It is a flawed thought to believe that a character has to be likable, and I think stems from the desire to see one’s own reflection.”
“Monument,” another collaboration with the Kennedy Center, was projected on the outside of the building. (Photo courtesy of A.M. Homes)
The other pet peeve is that “people want to write about their own experiences and also read what confirms their sense of self. I want to read and write to come to understand worlds beyond my own, experiences I will never have, because it is through that reading and writing that I grow and that my capacity for understanding, for compassion, for further expansion continues to develop.”
“When I think about teaching the Princeton students in particular, my hope is that I am teaching them how to engage their imaginations and a kind of intellectual risk taking, encouraging them to envision what doesn’t yet exist. That is a skill that works both for writing fiction, but also, importantly, for building a future of any kind. I teach creative writing but the larger subject is life.” — A.M. Homes
What is the most important thing she wants her students to learn?
“To engage with their imagination,” she says, “to take risk. If you want to be a future leader, or top in whatever field, you don’t get there by simply doing what has already been done. You need to be able to conceptualize what doesn’t exist, to invent a future, to imagine a path, and to learn to tolerate all the not knowing, all of the anxiety of the absence of a guarantee. I teach my students to make a mess, to risk failure, to take the high road into the future.”
Speaking of coming to the table, Homes recounts in The Mistress’s Daughter how she inherited her grandmother’s Nakashima table. “Whatever I know about how to live my life I learned from her,” Homes writes of her grandmother, who lent the money to buy an IBM Selectric when Homes decided to become a writer. The table became a mandate to work hard and live with as much grace and style as her grandmother did, she wrote. Ultimately Homes came to sit around the table with her own daughter.
“Chunky in Heat,” an opera based on a libretto by A. M. Homes, tells the story of a girl who comes of age at her family’s pool in the canyons of Los Angeles.
Homes is at work on a new novel as well as collaborating with visual artists on opera projects. “I’ve gotten more interested in creating operas because I enjoy the multi-dimensional experience, with sound, lights, actors, singers, a story, and dance,” she says. “And I am really interested in science and technology, so I spend a lot of time reading about what’s happening with AI and other new technology.”
The aforementioned Esther Gold advises another character that, if ever in a praying situation, to be specific, include certain clauses, “because God has a wicked sense of humor … and will only give you what you ask for.”
