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The Missouri Review 28.3 (2005) 100-120


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An Interview with A. M. Homes

Michael Piafsky

Christie Hodgen

[Begin Page 101]


Click for larger view		 A. M. Homes
[End Page 101]

INTERVIEWER: Tell us about your first story—when you wrote it, what it was about.

HOMES: The first recorded story was early in elementary school, as part of one of my classes, where we had to make a book. The big thing was, we would have to bind it in the library. It's some very strange story about a little girl who ends up taking LSD, and she was in some great adventure. I have no idea how I knew anything about that. It's entirely weird. I want to say that I probably wrote it in fourth grade. It's all in big, funny, handwritten print.

INTERVIEWER: That early?

HOMES: Oh, yes, I've been at it for a long time.

INTERVIEWER: You're well established now, with several published novels and short-story collections. You've been quoted as saying you sometimes wish you could write as you did in Jack, your first novel. What do you think a writer loses with experience?

HOMES: When you're writing a first book, or even very early in your career, you have a wonderful spaciousness to write whatever book you want to write. You're not aware of anyone looking in to see what you're doing. You're not thinking about trying to somehow do better than you did the last time. There's a naïveté and clarity early on that just gets more complicated as you're worrying about other things, especially if you're trying to make your living as a writer.

INTERVIEWER: So there's no going back.

HOMES: Right. Not that you would work any differently than how you work, but there's a kind of wonderfulness to that time when it's all yours.

INTERVIEWER: Your work has been called provocative and dangerous and controversial. It strikes me that those three adjectives involve the reader. Someone has to be there to be provoked or endangered or scandalized. Do you think about your audience as you write?

HOMES: That's such an interesting question because you articulated [End Page 102] something that often isn't articulated, which is that those responses are about the reader. They're about the reader being in one way or another challenged by the material, and the reader's response to or participation in the material. It's always been important for me to write books that are about making people think. Reading is a very active process. We come away from a book wondering about stuff. It's not like it's solved for you. It's not like at the end of it you think, I know how to handle this or I know what this is. But at the same time I would say I don't think about the reader because if I sat around worrying about it, I would be freaked out and wouldn't be able to do anything.

INTERVIEWER: Your novel The End of Alice details the exploits of two pedophiles and raised hackles. What's it like to have written one of the most banned books in America?

HOMES: What's important to me about it is that I'm not interested in controversy. I don't write to shock people; I don't write to cause that kind of controversy. What I do believe in is making work that prompts people to have a conversation, to look at the world they're living in and think about it. I feel like The End of Alice is about prompting a conversation that is essential in our culture and one that we still haven't had in great depth. The shock that people keep identifying me with just means that I've hit a nerve. Frankly, I take it to mean that I got it right in some way. But that's not my goal. I'm...

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