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A.M. Homes

In this honest, challenging interview, the author addresses why her memoir, The Mistress’ Daughter, isn’t about her

By Genie Williamson
Published: April 17th, 2007 | 11:28am

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Barbie Doll-fuckers, sympathetic child-molesters, and crack-smoking WASPs populate the fictional world of A.M. Homes. Homes' real-life birth parents, the focus of a new memoir, are somehow just as unsettling. Upon their reentrance into Homes' life, her mother stalked her, and her father insisted on rendezvousing in tawdry hotel rooms. After you've finished The Mistress's Daughter, you can't help but get the sense that Homes' mastery of the surreal has something to do with being the offspring of people whose grasp of reality is tenuous, their level of self-awareness hovering around that of the current presidential administration.

Unlike most books about miserable parents, The Mistress' Daughter isn't remotely sentimental. It weaves left-field flourishes into a narrative in which Homes herself is barely present, save for infrequent commentary about cranky archivists and the occasional cameo by one of her adoptive family's members. In one section, Homes details her search for distant relatives, recounting stories about people who may or may not be her ancestors. In another, Homes stages an imaginary court deposition given by her adoptive father. Short, stylized, and scathing, The Mistress' Daughter is the opposite of recent literary tell-all Sean Wilsey's Oh, the Glory of It All.

In late January 2007, Homes conceded to a brief phone interview.

Did you have any hesitations about writing a memoir?
I think I really am a fiction writer. I would say it’s exceptionally difficult to spend a long period of time writing about something that was both so personal and so painful. I’m going to write nonfiction, so I feel very compelled to get it right, so that took even longer — 10 years or more. Novels are about five years.

Why did you make the decision not to talk about your adoptive family?
My adoptive family isn’t a mystery to me. I didn’t really thing that that was what the book was about. I felt the book was about the experience of these people coming back that I didn’t know and who they were. It was a story about being found by my biological family and the fallout from that.

I don’t think a memoir is necessarily something about a person’s entire life. I think it’s about specific events.

Did you intend to help fellow adoptees by telling this story?
Do I hope that people find meaning or resonance or comfort or questions raised by it? Absolutely. I wouldn’t have published it otherwise. I might have written it, but the hope was that it reaches people and means something to people.

But I was thinking about how best to tell the story. I would say, honestly, in terms of when I write fiction or nonfiction, I’m not thinking about the reader. I’m thinking about “how do I best tell the story? How am I most faithful to the subject matter, whether it’s fictional subject matter or real subject matter?” I have so many other things to think about — (audience) isn’t at the top of my list.

My friend is writing an article called, “The New Man’s Bookshelf” for GQ. It’s replacing, I suppose, the old man’s bookshelf with Cheever and Updike and the like. He picked Music for Torching as one of the essential books in the New Man’s Bookshelf. How do you feel about that?
I think that’s a good idea. I think that the New Man’s Bookshelf should have books by women in it. I think that’s a good book to put in the New Man’s Bookshelf, but I think the last novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, might even be a better book to put in the New Man’s Bookshelf. Not that men only read books about men, but it’s a novel about this guy at a very specific point in his life. I just think it should be on the New Man’s Bookshelf. Maybe a whole row of books! How many shelves does the new man have? [laughs]

What are some of the books that you would put on there?
Joy of Cooking. I would put Phillip Roth’s last book Everyman on there, even though he’s old. I think that Phillip Roth is exceptional in the sense that he’s at a point in his career and in his life where he doesn’t have to keep being brilliant. He’s actually produced some really amazing books. The latter half of his career is more interesting than the earlier half.

There’s The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Brian Greene, whom I think is a very interesting writer — he wrote The Fabric of the Cosmos, which is all about physics. I love stuff like that. I might throw a Margaret Atwood on there. It’d look good on dates.

I would put people like Richard Yates, who’s a contemporary of Cheever, but he died before he got a place on anybody’s bookshelf, really.

I’ve always wanted to know -— did Revolutionary Road influence Music for Torching?
Revolutionary Road is not my favorite of Yates’ books. Disturbing the Peace is my favorite. I have a first edition of it, which was originally $7.95, and it starts off with the guy who’s been on a business trip, calling his wife, and he says that he can’t — he’s been on a bender in New York City. He can’t come home because he’s been drinking, he can’t come home, he’s in Grand Central, blah blah blah, and the wife says, “You just should come home.” And he says, “I didn’t buy a present for the kids,” and she says, “Just come home.” And he says, “I’ve been screwing a stewardess in Chicago all week,” and the wife still says, “Just come home,” which is just heartbreaking. It’s just a brilliant book — it’s just searing. I love it!

Cheever had more direct bearing on Music For Torching — Falconer and Bullet Park. Falconer was more of an influence on me for The End Of Alice.

How do you feel about one of the few women writers whose work gets labeled as “serious fiction?”
There’s “women’s fiction” and there’s “serious fiction.” I want to be in the serious fiction category. But you know, yeah, thank god! I firmly believe in serious fiction, and I’m hoping to run again for another term. [laughs]

It means a lot to me to not have my work divided by the gender of its author because that so doesn’t suit me in any way. I want to be a writer. I don’t want to be a woman writer, I want to be a writer. The problem is that we live in a society where, basically, we have women writers and writers, but if we’re gonna have it that way, then I’ll just go with the writers.

Grace Paley and I had a long talk about this once. Grace said that women have done men the favor of reading their work, and men had not returned the favor. Which is a truly interesting concept, but I also think that, traditionally, women have written what’s known to be more domestic fiction that’s about relationships and about their families and about home life, and men have traditionally written broader social subjects. My interest has always been the broader social subjects.

Obviously, in a novel like Music for Torching, I tried to mush the two together in some way, to write about broad social subjects and the world as it is now and domestic life, and look what happened! People suffered in the end.

I remember it was in graduate school. I was at Iowa, and I was both a playwright and a fiction writer. That was something that never happened before. I remember one of the play-writing teachers - a woman play-writing teacher – getting very mad at me and thinking that I was somehow misogynist because my writing and my interests and my role models are not — I mean, I love Lillian Hellman, but I also love Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, and those are the people who were playing with the things that interest me most. I was somehow expected — I mean, there is that thing — you were expected to operate within a certain sphere, and I wasn’t and I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.

I think that you’re supposed to write like a girl. I remember Brett Ellis telling me when I first met him, “I always thought you were a guy in your forties.” On the one hand, I took that as a compliment because it meant that, in my writing, I was doing a good job. I was capturing the characters I was writing about.

I like men. I like male writers. I want to be in their company. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like women writers also, but I’m happiest — I’m perfectly happy in a big ol’ pile of guys. Writers, of course. [laughs]

Whom are some of the women writers you admire?
I love Joan Didion. I would say Sontag, although, philosophically, I don’t always feel in alignment with her. Those are the two women writers whom I most revere. I think Margaret Atwood is wonderful, but she’s not read by the masses. So many people don’t know who she was. I think Jayne Anne Phillips is a very interesting writer, but then hasn’t done much lately. When Black Tickets came out, it was a very profound book for me because it was the first time that I saw somebody who was slightly older than I was doing what I wanted to do. She didn’t write like a girl, either, you know? She wrote like Sam Shepherd or something. I liked that.

What does it mean to write like a girl?
I dunno — like short, dainty sentences? [laughs] I have no idea. It was acute, in a book like Black Tickets, she was taking risks. She was writing about sex. She was writing from a variety of points of view and a variety of positions that were not necessarily as a girl, I think.

And Didion?
I don’t think of (her stuff) as writing memoir, I think of it as nonfiction. I think even in her last book, which obviously was entirely autobiographical, it just feels to me like good nonfiction. I would hope, that in some ways, that that’s what (The Mistress’ Daughter) does, too.

What’s interesting about this book is that this book is not written about me. More interesting than your question — why is it not about my adoptive family or my brother — it’s not about me. It’s about my biological family, and how I processed that. It’s not a memoir in some of the ways that other people’s memoirs are really more about them. That said, I think it also, unfortunately, is incredibly revealing. Although it’s not about me, obviously a lot of me comes through. I hate that.