Best known for her controversial novels featuring extreme situations and characters, A.M. Homes discusses her most recent book, The Unfolding, and her remarkable career authoring thirteen extraordinarily original books.
Debbie Millman:
America is a divided country. Each side is siloed inside its own media and hatred and violence are pervasive, but that doesn’t stop the imagination from leaping gamely over the divide, which is precisely what A.M. Homes has done in her latest novel. It’s titled The Unfolding, and it’s about a white man who sees the 2008 election of America’s first black president as a crisis for his kind. A.M. Homes has written 13 extraordinarily original books, and often explores uncomfortable situations and controversial characters in her fiction. Her bestselling memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter is about meeting her birth mother when she was in her 30s. A.M. also works in film and television. She has written an opera libretti and was a writer and producer for several seasons of one of my favorite shows ever, The L Word. A.M. Homes, welcome to Design Matters.
A.M. Homes:
Debbie, thank you so much for having me on. It’s a treat.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely thrilled. A.M. is it true that you went to your fourth grade Halloween party dressed as Willy Loman in your father’s suit, wearing a skinhead wig and carrying a briefcase?
A.M. Homes:
It is true. I did, and the only thing I will say to sharpen the definition is the skinhead wig was one of those sort of bald man wigs, sort of yellow flesh colored plastic with the ring of dark hair around the edges. Yeah, I wore my father’s suit and carried an old briefcase of his because he never really carried a briefcase and I was trick or treating that way, and so I would say “Trick or treat” and have people drop the candy into my briefcase.
Debbie Millman:
How did you know about Death of a Salesman in fourth grade?
A.M. Homes:
The home I grew up in was a complicated place and a child who had lived to be nine years old, died six months before I was born, and before I was adopted into the family. I would say there was a heavy sense of grief that just permeated everything always. So I describe it always to people as though I grew up at the edge of Washington DC in a house that basically had a black cloud over it, like you might see either in a Snoopy cartoon, but the vibe in the house was sort of … I would say sort of Death of a Salesman, Eugene O’Neill. There was not a lot of lightness. It’s very intense and dark.
Debbie Millman:
I know you started reading at a very young age. You also loved the collection of travel books for children, written and illustrated by the great Miroslav Šašek, and after checking out his book, This Is Venice, 13 times from your school library, the librarian finally bought you your own copy, which I believe you still own. What do you love most about this particular book?
A.M. Homes:
I love the whole series and the weirdest thing is I have still never been to Venice, which is just unconscionable.
Debbie Millman:
That was my next question.
A.M. Homes:
I know, I think it’s the movie … what is the movie with Donald Sutherland and the kid in the red, the kid gets killed.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
A.M. Homes:
Don’t Look Now.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
A.M. Homes:
That scared me so incredibly badly that despite my incredible love for Venice, I was like, “I’m sorry. I can never go to Venice,” but I would like to conquer that. I think I love those books because I loved anything that took me into another world and into a world that was vibrant and had possibility. The idea of riding in a boat through streets or canals just seemed amazing. So yeah, that was my favorite, but I also actually … This is London was a close second with The Palace Guard on the front.
Debbie Millman:
You were raised in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Your father was an artist. Your mom was a guidance counselor. What kind of art did your dad make?
A.M. Homes:
That’s a good question. My father was a painter when I was a kid growing up, he actually owned and ran a gas station because he had to earn a living and he was a social realist painter. He painted from the time he was about 14 years old, until he died at ’94. The basement is still filled with all of his artwork, because he never would give any away or sell any. He was thought to be a very talented painter. He had a scholarship to go to painting school at the Phillips Collection. He also worked there as a guard and he … only like when I was a much older adult, he said to me, “Oh yeah, Matisse used to come in and look at his paintings all the time.” I thought, how wild is that? So, he was a social realist, very political in his painting.
A.M. Homes:
My mother was a stay-at-home mom when I was little and then went back to school and got a master’s degree in counseling, of course, when I was a very difficult to deal with teenager. So that was an interesting juxtaposition, shall we say.
Debbie Millman:
You already mentioned being adopted at birth and coming into a family where your nine year old brother had died six months before you were born, and you’ve written about how for a long time you thought of yourself as a replacement child occupying this space once held for another child. That had a huge impact on your development as a child, as a girl and as a writer. Did that sense of being a replacement ever dissipate?
A.M. Homes:
No, no, I still have it. I mean, it’s not just being a replacement. On the one hand, there’s a piece of it that is … I would say a lack of almost any kind of identity because I don’t know … absent that cloak of the replacement child and literally moving into a house and a room and there being toys that belong to this other person and a sense too, that one had to care for this family, and I would say it’s very hard as an infant to know how to fill those shoes and what to do. So that never went away, and I would say still the sense of profound illegitimacy, do I have a right to exist, is with me constantly. And I think on the one hand, if there is any positive to it or upside of it, is it does allow me enormous freedom when it comes to inhabiting the shoes of others.
A.M. Homes:
I don’t feel wedded to any particular identity so much so that I can’t get past myself because I can’t even figure out what myself would be. That said, it’s a complex place to come from and definitely very much on the outside of everything, so working on it still.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You talk about feeling … in addition to feeling like a replacement, also feeling like an outsider and that sense of social alienation is really what inspired you to first start writing, how old were you when you wrote your first piece?
A.M. Homes:
Well, it’s funny, Debbie, only because we’re on Zoom, even though we’re recording this, I’m going to wheel away and show you something. This is only because I’m in my home office. This is my first book, Debbie. So what I’m showing you is a Valore covered book that we made in elementary school. This is the Mysterious Stories of Haunted Homes Hollow. This is still when I used my given name, Amy H. it’s written an ill by A.M., Amy H. This goes back, I would say to the early 70s. So that would be my first book, it’s a little disturbing.
Debbie Millman:
No, I think it’s quite remarkable. That cover is so groovy.
A.M. Homes:
Well, we had to learn how to do proper library binding, that was-
Debbie Millman:
Yes. Aside from what you just showed us, what kinds of stories were you writing, were they macabre, were they funny, were they witty? Talk about your style.
A.M. Homes:
I think it’s funny when I could look back at these, and I only found this book a few years ago, just by the dedication, which I’ll tell you, it’s dedicated to my right hand.
Debbie Millman:
Genius.
A.M. Homes:
They are funny. They are already macabre. They are as complex then as I am now, I would say filled with contradiction and oddity and quirky. I also had terrible learning disabilities and had horrible handwriting. They used to say to me, you’ll never write, and they didn’t mean you’ll never write a book. They meant like you’ll never write a check. You’ll never write anything because no one can read your handwriting. So every afternoon when the other kids went to play sports or do other things, I had to go to the handwriting tutor or the visual training person. My entire childhood was basically one form of correction or therapy or another. I mean, I couldn’t take a test. I had terrible grades.
A.M. Homes:
I also think probably some of it is related to adoption, and I think there is a lack of integration that adopted people have. It’s a longer story, but if you look at the number of adopted kids who have learning issues or sensory integration issues, I think it’s because you’re born and they say, “Okay, you were born Gloria Steinem, but the Schlafly family adopted you. So now you’re Phyllis Schlafly and good luck with that.” I think there really is biological cellular or knowledge of who we are, and it’s very hard without any acknowledgement of that to integrate it and to become a singular person. So I think in some ways, probably some of my learning issues, in part, came from that.
Debbie Millman:
You spent a lot of time at your local public library growing up, and at that time, they had phone books for every city in America. I understand you would look up names of people whose work interested you and you wrote to them, you wrote to artists, musicians, movie directors, you didn’t write asking for an autograph for a glossy photo. You wrote them really interesting letters.
A.M. Homes:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
First of all, I found it astonishing that you could find so many addresses so publicly.
A.M. Homes:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You wrote to Pete Townsend, you wrote to John Sayles and they wrote back.
A.M. Homes:
Again, and I don’t know what to make of this, but I wrote to lots of different people and it was shocking. I literally would go through the New York City phone book. That was the really hot one and you’d look and you’d be like, “Art Garfunkel. That’s so interesting. That’s listed.” I had a little black three ring binder notebook and I would scroll out the person’s name and number and their address. I thought the truth is in some ways, I would be equally happy writing letters to strangers, but you don’t know who they are. So in some ways, the knownness of the person was only a kind of vetting. I mean, it was people’s work I admired, but it was also that I knew they probably weren’t dangerous in some sense, right?
A.M. Homes:
So I did, I wrote letters to strangers, lots of letters to strangers and often, the women’s strangers I wrote to would write me a very cryptic short single line letter back. Thank you for letters. I don’t correspond with strangers. I wrote to Rita Mae Brown, and she said something like, “Thanks for your letter. I hope you find a place to make friends.” Something like that. I was like, “Thanks.” It was interesting, the men happily wrote back, were very engaging. There are any number of people who could have in some ways, screwed me up and absolutely didn’t. Pete Townsend was a wonderful correspondent. Very encouraging, he would send me long letters. I mean, we would talk about writing. We would talk about the who.
A.M. Homes:
It was really bad when Keith Moon died. I mean, that was the time period. Then, John Sayles and I became correspondence for very, very long time and I would write him and he would write me back on these yellow legal pads, just incredibly long letters. Yeah, and it was a way of writing myself out of the world I lived in and into literally another world, but they were not fan based. It was always like, here’s what happened today or this person is being really mean to me, whatever, and about writing.
Debbie Millman:
Have you corresponded with them as an adult, do they know that you’re you?
A.M. Homes:
John Sayles knows that I’m me and Pete Townsend may know that I’m me. Rita Mae Brown, I have no idea because I can take a hint.
Debbie Millman:
If she regrets that letter, no.
A.M. Homes:
I don’t know, I do have the letter. Yeah, it’s funny, but yes, I very much wanted to connect with a large … a world just outside of my own and bigger than what I was living in, and I would go … it’s funny too because I would go to therapy as a young person. I would say when I grow up, I’m going to be friends with these people and the therapist really thought I was just out of my mind. Now, I think about it. I’m like, “See.”
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, clearly the help you were getting, whether it’d be the school counselors or the writing tutors or the therapists were all wrong. So good for you.
A.M. Homes:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I read that you also wrote some of your correspondence about the book of poems you were working on at the time, titled, “An Introduction to Death with Excerpts from Life.” I was talking to my dear friend, Maria Popova about that, and she asked me to ask you to please read one of the poems from that book, if you still had it.
A.M. Homes:
I don’t … I found a few. I’m not sure that they were exactly from them but they certainly are Juvenalia very much so. That was so … An Introduction to Death with Excerpts from Life was a first book that I wrote when I decided to take 10th grade off and stay in my room, and I used to smoke. I used to smoke cigarettes and I could only smoke in my room because it was forbidden anywhere. So my room was a giant ashtray and I would smoke two packs of Marlboro a day, not eat and write these poems that were so upsetting. That was when my mother was in graduate school and I would come out and I’d hand her my terrible handwriting, a really upsetting poem and say, “Would you mind typing this for me?”
A.M. Homes:
Then of course, she would call the therapist and be like, “Oh no, she’s at it again. She’s writing these really disturbing poems about harming herself and so on.” I think that was my way of telling my mother how bad I felt and it’s so awful now, when I think about it in retrospect. So yeah, I’ll read you … this is one from about that time period, it’s very short and then, I’ll read you something that might be a little better. So this is just called Dreaming Evil. The fastest way to rid myself of you is to kill myself.
Debbie Millman:
Okay. Thanks.
A.M. Homes:
That was a special one. Yeah. They’re all really intense and then, I’ll give you two more little short ones. One that’s that’s very nice and this is a pleasant one. It’s called Snow and it says, “Flakes, I caught in the Palm of my hand and carried into my mother to replace the faded doilies under the lamps in our living room. At my tea party, the white lace tablecloth melts under a cup of hot chocolate.”
Debbie Millman:
That’s wonderful.
A.M. Homes:
That’s what I did as a kid. My first writing classes I got into, I took advanced poetry, graduate poetry at American university with Linda Pastan because she would let me take her class.
Debbie Millman:
Is that when you wrote The Call-In Hour?
A.M. Homes:
Well, it was also at American University, but it was in a playwriting class when I wrote a play called the Call-In Hour about … basically, it was a response to when the fellow who shot John Lennon pulled Catcher in the Rye Out of his pocket. I found that very disturbing. The whole thing was very disturbing. I wanted to sort of write about how we shouldn’t as individuals hang onto these literary characters and invest so much in them as sort of public figures and so on. So I wrote a play about a radio call-in show and I did all this research, looked in billboard magazine in the same library and found all the radio stations and done all this stuff. In the end, J.D. Salinger calls in and he confronts Holden Caufield.
A.M. Homes:
I sent the play out all over the country, thinking in a very naive way, “Hey, I’ve written a play,” and it won a playwriting award. Then also Salinger’s agents got wind of it and they’re like, “Oh no, no, no. You can’t do this.” And then the playwriting people were like, “Well you can because Holden Caufield is probably a public figure,” and I didn’t use the material from the book. So, it turned into a whole legal push-pull that was, I would say very unpleasant for a 19 year old.
Debbie Millman:
You ended up changing the characters and really removing the whole Catcher in the Rye aspect to the play.
A.M. Homes:
Not really. So the funny thing is all I really changed was I changed the title of Catcher in the Rye to Life in the Outfield, which is so funny and so, youthfully naive. Then, Holden Caufield’s name, we changed to Harmon Christopher, but I was so tormented by the whole thing, and I was already a very shy kid. When I won this playwriting award, no one thought that a child had won it, they thought some 40 year old government worker had won it. I couldn’t go to the opening night. I spent that evening, this was so me driving around, almost like how Holden had his brothers, the red hat. I had my mother’s red Volvo, and I literally just spent the night driving around Washington DC in my mom’s Volvo while my mother and father and various aunts and uncles all went to the opening of my play and I just couldn’t.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written that in life as in Salinger. There is grief, a disconnect, a romantic wishing that somewhere out there, there is something else, something more, something other. Then, grief comes around again. It is pointless to be so optimistic knowing that this is it, this is what there is. Do you still feel that way?
A.M. Homes:
I do. I was like, when did I write that? Yes, I totally feel that way. Then, it’s funny because the new book opens with this line, “This can’t happen here,” and always the question is which of the this is, is this?
Debbie Millman:
I love that, which of the this is, is this? All of this happened, your first play, your other chat books, I guess, we can call them. Before you even went to college, and you eventually, got your BA from Sarah Lawrence College and your MFA from the University of Iowa’s renowned Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, your debut novel, Jack was written while you were still an undergraduate student. It is about a teenager whose father reveals that he’s gay. Is it true that you wrote the book to avoid actually writing a paper?
A.M. Homes:
Yeah, totally. So I-
Debbie Millman:
Okay, so let’s do something even harder.
A.M. Homes:
I went to something like five or six undergraduate schools and I talk about this a lot with my students because people will look at me and think, “Oh, that’s a very successful person,” and I think, yes and there’s a lot underneath that that is so painful and unpleasant and not the markers that you would identify as on your road to success. So I think also apropos of people who are adopted, I believe that adopted people, we all do. Again, for me, adoption is sort of a heightened experience, have trouble with transition. So I would say the transition from high school where I’d already dropped out once for a year to write this book of poems that was really depressing. The idea of then leaving home and going off to college really landed hard on me.
A.M. Homes:
I was having a lot of my own questions about my identity, which obviously I still have and all of that stuff and started having just unbelievable panic attacks, horrible, horrible panic attacks. So I tried to go to school. I tried to go to the University of Maryland and I sat in the student union. I read Larry Kramer’s Faggots and ate cheese doodles for a month and a half. I used all my book money and just sat there, eating books and going mental and didn’t tell anybody and then finally, just dropped out. Then, it took me a long time to even sort screw up the courage to do anything else, and I ultimately, went to the American Film Institute, and had a school in Washington, I did that. And then, I went to the Corcoran School of Art and studied painting, which I loved, and that was wonderful and writing with a wonderful wacky teacher there.
A.M. Homes:
Then, I left there and I went to American university. I applied and I took Linda Pastan’s graduate creative writing course and they were like, the only other person we do this was Anne Beattie, but I kept thinking, “Oh God, what happens if I have to take English or English 101.” I don’t know how to write a paper. The only papers I wrote in high school were literally on … and I love this, in 1979, I still have the transsexual surgery, which I researched at the National Institute of Health and another paper about the history of the CIA. So all of the threads have been there the whole time, right?
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. This is who you are.
A.M. Homes:
Totally. Exactly, and in American University, you’re going to have to write a paper for this children’s literature class. I was like, that’s going to be a problem. I said, “Would it be possible for me to write a book instead of paper?” The professor said, “What makes you think you can do that?” And I didn’t say it, but I thought, because I know I cannot write this paper. So I wrote that book there and then, I continued when I transferred to Sarah Lawrence because they would take all my credits from all the other schools and kind of wrap them up in a bundle that didn’t have course requirements. I went to study with Grace Paley at Sarah Lawrence and she worked with me on getting Jack into shape.
Debbie Millman:
Your next book, published in 1990 was a collection of provocative short stories with, I think one of the best titles of all time, could almost be the subtitle of my life, The Safety of Objects, which included the story, A Real Doll, which is a story of a teenage boy who was in love with a Barbie doll and drags her to have sex with her and then decapitates Ken and ejaculates into the hole where his head is. This is the book that introduced me to your work. I have the paper back here, right here. How did you respond to the press about your work being provocative or controversial or pornographic at that time? Because little did anybody know what was coming next?
A.M. Homes:
Sure. I know exactly. I think because of the levels of, in a way, denial or confusion or complexity in my childhood, I’ve always been very driven to sort of truths in some way and to talking about things that people don’t like to talk about. So literally in my family, there was a day when I looked out my bedroom window and the backyard was on fire. So there was fire in the backyard, in the grasses and in the trees, and I went in and said to my parents, the backyard is on fire. They said, “No, it’s not.” And I said … and I was like nine or something. I said, well, either you call the fire department or I will be calling the fire department because the backyard is in fact on fire.
A.M. Homes:
I think coming from that sort of background was difficult. So, in a way, when people will talk about the work being controversial or pushing buttons or breaking taboos, I think on the one hand, I am talking about always the things that are difficult to talk about and that somehow is my job, if it pushes a button, then I think it must be touching a nerve, and if it’s touching a nerve, it means we have that nerve and therefore, it is part of who we are, so in the end, what I’m always and only writing about is human behavior and what compels us to do what we do and what it means to us. Beyond that, I don’t set out to be provoking. I don’t think, “Oh, let’s just see who I can annoy today,” because the other piece of it is, in some ways in my nutty outsider sense, I’m also very vulnerable and very, I don’t want to say fragile, because that would be giving power to others.
A.M. Homes:
I’m definitely vulnerable, so It’s not like I think, “Oh I just love when people don’t like what I do,” but I feel compelled to get to other kinds of truth. So, I can’t seem to not do that.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, as someone who actively sought out a number of your books because of the topic matter, because so few people were writing about things that had happened to me, that was enormously helpful, enormously helpful. I have a copy, a first edition signed copy. I went to see you read of The End of Alice. You wrote that in 1996. This is a story told by a jailed pedophile in his 23rd year in a maximum security prison. He’s there after brutally raping and murdering a young girl named Alice and his correspondence from jail with a 19 year old girl who writes to him about her lust for and seduction of a 12 year old boy. The New York times stated that the book was exhilarating perverse, luring us into the lives of characters, simultaneously repellent and seductive.
Debbie Millman:
A.M. what made you decide to write about this specific subject matter? I’m sure you’ve been asked this question a million times, but I genuinely am curious as to what provoked that specific dynamic of this pedophile and this young girl.
A.M. Homes:
Sure. So in a way, the answer is really easy because living in our society and looking at the ways in which we dealt with things like the sexual abuse of children throughout the church and all of those episodes that have come to light, the way in which when the Robert Maple Thorpe art show was up at the Corcoran, it was deemed completely morally socially reprehensible and needed to come down immediately. And then also at that same time period, Madonna published the sex book of photographs. When I kept thinking what makes these sexy, because I didn’t think they were. So all of those conversations and then also the fixation that we have on punishment on differentiating ourselves from what we perceive as the other.
A.M. Homes:
So when we have things where a person would be sentenced to death and you’d see the vigil outside the prison, and then we get the announcement that they’d been executed, there is a sense of social relief. Well, we took care of that and yet, the big question that, in the way that I often pick the least likely character to confront a complicated idea, the pedophile in The End of Alice says, if I’m in jail, why is it still happening? So for me, it really was a question about why and how is a society do we do such a bad job dealing with this and talking about this. That was really hard for people and still is, and it’s funny too, because that became one of the moments where people would say, “What do you do with bad reviews?”
A.M. Homes:
I said, there’s such a thing as a good bad review. The book isn’t there for you to like it. The book is there for you to talk about it and think about it. So I don’t need people to say, “Oh, I love that so much.” That actually is scary to me sometimes because I’m thinking, “Well, what about it do you love so much?” So it’s all it’s complicated and then, that book was interestingly was used to train young psychiatrists how to deal with pedophiles because there’s not a lot of treatment options and there’s not a lot of success. So some people in that psychiatric community felt that it was a good representation, which I took as a compliment that I somehow captured aspects of the character.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think women are much more vocal about these topics now, especially after Me Too. In 1996, it was still seen as somehow being damaged. People felt quite a bit of shame. I know I did. This was the first time I had read anything that gave me a perspective into the mind of a pedophile, and it gave me an opportunity almost clinically to be able to see a different perspective, and that you’ve said that children will find their way to information and stories that they need to read in order to help them figure out who they are. This is one of those books, that certainly it did it for me. It helped me understand a dynamic that I was even afraid to talk about.
A.M. Homes:
Absolutely, and I think that the dynamic too, of both abuser and abused and questions about seduction or attraction are really, really complicated and sort of like a taboo within a taboo. So yes, I think that that is interesting. It’s fascinating too, that we’re talking about the idea of people, children included and importantly finding their way to the information that they need, the information that helps them figure out who they are and also to find that they’re not alone in the world and yet, we’re right at the cusp of an incredible moment where once again, books are being banned, information is being withheld from children. That makes me very nervous and uncomfortable, very.
Debbie Millman:
I learned in my research that Jack, your first novel is one of the hundred most banned books in the country. It’s on the most recent list of books that politicians want to ban in all of Texas. I’m assuming that The End of Alice is there as well.
A.M. Homes:
I’ve never seen The End of Alice on the list, which is so interesting to me because I think Jack is this totally, totally sweet book about a boy, trying to understand his family, trying to understand himself. It’s not particularly sexual in any way. It’s not confrontational. It’s actually always on these books, for best books for teenagers to read. Yes, it is one of the hundred most banned books. End of Alice is never mentioned, I don’t know if it’s just the list, they don’t even mention those because I think in some ways, it’s somewhat out of the mainstream, which is fine. I think it is the books that are in the mainstream that are familiar to people and accessible importantly are also the ones that are being most quickly banned.
Debbie Millman:
A.M. a lot of your work is written from the male point of view and you’ve often talked about how often people are surprised that you’re female, because your name is genderless. I also read that when two of your stories ended up in the penguin book of gay men’s fiction, you considered it a real compliment.
A.M. Homes:
Absolutely. Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Talk about this sort of spectrum of perspective and how you are able to navigate that continuum.
A.M. Homes:
I think for me, in some ways, that continuum probably comes from being adopted and replacing a dead boy who’s nine or 10 years older than I am because often, my male characters, I don’t want to say are that man, but they are a man who would be about nine or 10 years older than me. So I think definitely a part of my soul inhabits that space in some way and feels very comfortable there. Also, it’s interesting … and I learned this in some ways from Grace Paley. So Grace was so wonderful because Grace was this ardent, ardent feminist, but she loved men. So one didn’t exclude the other. I would say, I do love men and I am fascinated by men. So in many ways, oftentimes I’m exploring parts of the sort inner lives of men that are not often explored in fiction, including in fiction by men, which is sort of a deeper kind of psychological or off the record state.
A.M. Homes:
I’ve always loved in a way also, sort of the liner notes to things. That was always the most important or best part of the record album outcome was-
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.
A.M. Homes:
Where was it made? What was the studio? Who are the musicians? Who was the producer? I feel like in some ways the men in my books, I’m cataloging their lives along those lines. So there’s that piece of it. Also, I would say everything from … because my own relationship to my own identity is ever in flux in some way. So I still would say, I don’t have a firm sense of, “Oh, I am this person.” So I don’t have that point of view to write from, in some sense. When I wrote The Memoir, it’s interesting in many ways it’s more about being found by the biological family and what I discovered about them than it is really about me, and certainly, not very much about the family I grew up in, which was that piece of it, it was intentional, but I’m still a work in progress.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that you feel that you actually understand men better than women. Do you still feel that way?
A.M. Homes:
I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s true anymore. I think in some ways now also having raised a daughter, I probably now have more understanding of women than I certainly did when I was younger, if that makes any sense. It’s all fascinating and it’s so interesting just to think about on the one hand, how gender and gender roles are so socially determined and parsed out and so on. Yet, we’re also at this time where so many … especially, young people are saying, I’m just not playing that game.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
A.M. Homes:
I won’t take any of those. It’s really fascinating, and I wish I would say it’s liberating, but I think it’s also difficult because I think in the same way that society wants to believe certain things about itself, society really wants there just to be a male and a female and every form has a mother and a father, and the idea of wrapping one’s head around any alterations of that seems to be astoundingly confusing.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s difficult for the people that don’t want to accept it. I mean, it could be difficult in coming to terms with what you believe about who you are, but I think that-
A.M. Homes:
Absolutely.
Debbie Millman:
That’s where the difficulty should lie, not with the people that have to contend with it.
A.M. Homes:
Yes, and I think the difficulty too is in … obviously, one sense of self evolves over an interesting period of time, but often, that comes to almost like a tipping point, right around puberty or right before puberty. I think that’s just such a complicated time in a young person’s life anyway. So there’s so many different pieces of identity. I think again, we somehow expect them to all agree with each other, and I would say truthfully, I think it’s the very rare person whose identity is all of one piece and all of one gender and all of one experience because certainly my experience of identity is that it is absolutely 50,000 different things, all in one person every day.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written 13 books. You can only imagine, I think how difficult it was for me to decide, “Well, which ones are we going to talk about today?” Because I don’t want to just talk about one or the other. I want to talk about as many as possible. The only other book I want to talk to you about today before we talk about your new book, which has some of the most extraordinarily detailed characters I’ve read in a very long time, you get lots of perspectives from lots of different people, men, women, kids. In any case, I want to talk a little bit about your memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter, which was published in 2007 and shares the story of how, when you were 31 years old, your biological mother contacted your parents, their attorney.
Debbie Millman:
And asked if you might be in touch with her and the attorney contacted your parents, your adoptive parents who waited until you came home from Christmas to share the news and you write this, “Christmas 1992, I go home to Washington, DC. We have something to tell you, my mother says. Someone is looking for you. After a lifetime spent in a virtual witness protection program, I’ve been exposed. I am the mistress’s daughter. My birth mother was young unmarried and my father, older with a family of his own. When I was born, a lawyer called my adoptive parents and said, your package has arrived. The fragile narrative, the plot of my life has been abruptly recast.”
Debbie Millman:
“In my dreams. My birth mother is the queen of queens and she has made a fabulous life for herself as ruler of the world, except for one missing link, me.” How accurate was that assessment when you ended up meeting Ellen?
A.M. Homes:
Not accurate at all. No.
Debbie Millman:
Is that imagination wonderful?
A.M. Homes:
Yeah. Fantasy.
Debbie Millman:
You learned that your birth mother, Ellen, and your birth father, a much older banker named Norman Hect had an affair and conceived when … they conceived you when Ellen was 22, and when she realized that Norman, wasn’t going to live up to his promise to leave his wife and marry her, she gave you up for adoption and 31 years later, Ellen suddenly returns expecting you to be there, waiting and stopped time, and you write that the randomness with which she contacted the attorney has never escaped you. It was a bit like you were a package or a coat. She absentmindedly left behind 31 years before. What was reuniting with her life?
A.M. Homes:
Well, it’s complicated, number one, as always, and I would say one of the things about being adopted, and we all have elements of this in our lives, but is having no control over your existence or your experience, which on the one hand, everyone is like, “Well, I didn’t decide to be born.” I mean, that’s a common thing you hear children say. I will say that there’s something about being brought into a family to kind of try to repair the family. Even if it’s not spoken, it wasn’t on the job description. So you’re always sort of in service. Then, in some ways the idea that people could come back 31 years later and again, expect for you to be welcoming and ready to see them is a whole other thing.
A.M. Homes:
I tried to of slow the process down and have Ellen exchange a few letters with me and then, ultimately, we had a few phone calls and she desperately, desperately wanted to see me. I had a book that was coming out and I really wasn’t ready to see her. Then, I was giving a reading at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, which is where I was giving a reading just last night. She appeared at the reading and in the way only of what can happen in worlds of fiction and so on, the day before that or either one or two days before that, I literally stuck the newspaper in my eye and shredded my cornea.
A.M. Homes:
In those days for shredded cornea, they used to put what looked like a giant Maxi pad over your eye. So I had one eye that was covered completely, and the other was kind of closed in a kind of compassionate relationship to the first. So I’m giving my reading through this little pinhole of the thing. Then, when I finish, people are coming up and talking to me, I saw her approaching and I thought this can’t happen. My mother is here, my grandmother is here, my fourth grade teacher is here. She came up to me and I knew who it was immediately. Not because I recognized her literally, but because I could tell that this is somebody who wants something from me very badly.
A.M. Homes:
I said like you’re not supposed to be here. There are people here who’s privacy I have to protect. It was really unnerving and scary. Of course, my adoptive mother also saw the whole same strength through the corner of her eye and was terrified because it was as though I was having an affair or something, and both people turned up at the same place at the same time. I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, this can’t happen.” So it was intense.
Debbie Millman:
Ellen turns out to be a needy narcissist. She calls you on Valentine’s day and upset that you didn’t send her a Valentine, tells you to go to the roof of your building and jump off.
A.M. Homes:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
How were you able to integrate this into your psyche?
A.M. Homes:
I don’t think I was, which is probably a good sign. That’s sort of one benefit of having this happen at 31 was I already had in some measure developed in a lot of ways. Had I been younger, it would’ve been really, really dangerous and potentially very destructive because even at 31, having had a measure of success already, doing well and so on, it was completely … it was like my hard drive got crumbs in it and just ground to all. Yeah, because everything that you think about yourself or every idea you have of your identity realizing too, that identity is such a structure, it’s a fiction, it’s a thing we hang so much on, but it’s very, very fragile.
A.M. Homes:
So having that kind of pulled out from under, took many, many months to even begin to kind of glue back together. I also feel that there’s a way in which a person can hold off information, so where you can resist knowing on a psychological level, what you already know, and I thought, I didn’t want to do a really loud version of that because I thought that also would be self-destructive in some ways. So it is what it is and it went through the cycle, it went through, but it was not easy.
Debbie Millman:
You also end up meeting your biological father and see each other sporadically over the next few years. Norman seems to struggle with feelings of responsibility to you, push-pull kind of relationship, ultimately abandons your relationship, leaving you alone, to manage all of these myriad pieces of your biological heritage, which is also a significant and really interesting part of the book. You also write about the nature of time regarding the ramification of this experience and you state, “I now understand more about the nature of stopped or fractured time, how fragments or experiences can remain trapped in a moment long past, how trauma can freeze an entire life and how time itself can suspend, conflate, blur so that it can be solid, liquid, gas, all in one day and then back again.”
Debbie Millman:
“Even for those of us who feel we have integrated our history, there can be fragments like shrapnel that push to the surface without warning and there, ladies and gentlemen, the definition of life.”
A.M. Homes:
Who wrote that, that’s so good. I fully believe that, but yes.
Debbie Millman:
As you were finishing, writing the Mistress’s Daughter and had investigated your lineage, you came upon what you referred to as a strange piece of information, you discovered that your ancestors had owned all the land that is now Capitol Hill in Washington DC, so my question is really?
A.M. Homes:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
A.M. Homes:
It’s a pretty wild segue, but so when writing the new book, the unfolding, there is this thread that definitely sort of wraps around my own life a little bit, but both the character of the big guy and Megan are obsessed with George Washington. They’re obsessed with history and those are subjects that for me have come to be more important in more recent years. I didn’t even know that much about George Washington, when I started writing it. So as I’m finishing the book, I’m pretty much almost done a relative I’ve never heard of, never met before, happens to email me and said, “Oh, I was doing family research and I realize we’re related and blah, blah, blah, and do you have this information about the family?”
A.M. Homes:
Of course, every time I get an email like that, it just sends me down multiple rabbit holes, a rabbit hole about my identity and of course, a rabbit hole because I’m a reporter and a studier and I need the information. So it turns out two things. One is that one of my ancestors was married to George Washington’s great grandfather. Then, when she died, her sister married George Washington’s great grandfather, and I just think, “God, that’s so weird.” Then, this same ancestor had said to me, the family used to own a lot of land in Washington. I remembered that my biological father had also said the same thing. He had about in this kind of a swagger and this kind of assumption of great privilege that I could never really figure out where it came from.
A.M. Homes:
As I was doing the research, I found this information that this ancestor who came on one of the first ships from England to America and was granted land in Maryland, ultimately ended up with more than 15,000 acres of land, and among that was the land that is now Capitol Hill. It is really all of the land that was now Capitol Hill, not just a little piece of it or so on. It was so long ago, he owned it, I want to say in 1638 with another man. It wasn’t all just his and then, sold it by 1640, the rest of his share to this other guy. So long before it was even developed.
A.M. Homes:
I thought, that is so interesting because in a way, even as I’m writing this story, which is about sort of power and the desire to hang on to power and the relationship of racism and sexism to all these things, I’m also thinking, well, who owned the land before they owned it? It came from somewhere. It’s not like you just randomly start owning land, but I found that truly fascinating and kind of caught me off guard in the best of ways, just that you can write your way towards what some piece of your being knows about.
Debbie Millman:
I also was wondering, back to that biological cellular level, there’s some knowledge somewhere.
A.M. Homes:
I think so, and the other second sort of crazy thread to it was that last year I also wrote … I’ve written two operas so far. The one I wrote was last year for the Kennedy center and it’s about a monument to women’s suffrage. It was the only monument to women in the US Capitol. It was given in 1920 and then, put in the basement for 70 years. So, I had to write this piece that was trying to figure out how do we talk about history? How do we talk about that the one monument in the US Capitol is the women’s suffrage is three white women. So how do you talk about everyone else’s relationship to getting the vote and so on?
A.M. Homes:
So that was also very interesting and literally put me in the capital, the whole opera takes place in the rotunda, which of course then two months before the opera opens is of course, January 6th, that is all taking place in that same rotunda with that same statue there. I was like, “Oh my God, this is just all so weird.”
Debbie Millman:
Well, your brand new book, The Unfolding, begins on election night, November, 2008, when Barack Obama won the presidential election and your book concludes on inauguration day in January of 2009, when he was sworn in. One of the protagonists of the story who you refer to as Big Guy. He loves his family money and country. The book begins with Big Guy utterly undone by the results of the election. So he gathers a group of like-minded men to try and reclaim their version of the American dream. Meanwhile, as they try to build a scheme to, as you put it disturb and disrupt, the Big Guy’s wife, Charlotte grieves, a life not lived while his 18 year old daughter, Megan’s life seems to be remaking itself as well. Why politics?
A.M. Homes:
Why politics? Because politics is history. Politics is culture. Politics is the push and pull of who we are and who we hope to be, I think and I really felt like something weird was happening in this country. I started this book well before Trump was elected and I felt like not only had the Americans sort of political establishment lost touch with the average American, but that this new thing, which isn’t really that new, but dark money was starting to flow in, in increasingly large amounts. So I think part of it too, is the exponential increase in that dark money and in think tanks and institutes and ways in which one buys air time for narrative that may not even be true.
A.M. Homes:
I mean, it’s very complicated, but that was progressively more and more disturbing to me. So I felt like I needed to kind of figure out how to talk about it. Also, I felt like it’s two different threads. So one thread is that I feel like when there was a previous election, where I went to bed thinking Al Gore had won and I woke up and George Bush was president. I was like, I missed something while I was sleeping, which for a person who’s a worrier, it’s a good way to get insomnia, like don’t turn the news off, stay awake. That was in a way, happened because of … and I made it a person, not in the book but in my imagination hanging Chad, who is not a person, but a thing in Florida, and because the Republicans had control over Florida, they were able to actually claim the presidential election.
A.M. Homes:
Somehow there wasn’t enough of a fight for that, which is a whole other problem. So when Obama wins and they don’t have another trick that they can pull out, this group of men becomes really disturbed, and what you begin to see is what I would describe of, the fear of older white men, that they are losing power. They are losing all of the things that they took to be theirs and theirs alone, and they’re going to now have to share all that. I think that Obama’s election unleashed a kind of racism and sexism that’s always been there. I mean, we know that, but it kind of almost in some bizarre way, gave it permission to surface all the more. I think we’re still progressively seeing that.
A.M. Homes:
So that’s sort of why I chose that moment, and also, because that moment was so powerful on the other side, for many of us, I bought a new TV, it was my first TV since college, and I got a bigger TV to have people over to watch. That difference between people taking to the streets, celebrating the idea that we could live in a different kind of a country where many points of view, many voices could be heard and so on. Then, the sheer terror that that invoked in white people. I mean, that’s the only way I can describe it. It was interesting to me.
Debbie Millman:
One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is how you weave these sort of fictive characters with real characters, John McCain, George Bush, Condoleezza Rice makes an appearance, and you refer to figures such as Malcolm Moos who wrote president Eisenhower’s Military Industrial Complex speech in 1961, I think. I actually quite inadvertently learned a lot about history, reading your book while I was mesmerized by the plot, how much research into American political history did you have to do or did you already know everything that you were writing about?
A.M. Homes:
I definitely did not already know all of it. I mean, I have to say I have progressively fallen more and more in love with history and I would call it histories because that’s one of the big things that also is, as I say, in my craw, that we tend to think there is an American history and then five seconds later, if you just even look at it, you realized there are so many histories that are not included and that’s really important to me as well. So I did do a ton of research and I’ve always been obsessed with the period that really begins with Eisenhower’s speech about the rise of the military industrial complex, because that’s part of how we economically got from there to here.
A.M. Homes:
So that’s really important, and this book is … I mean, I’m glad you got all that because it is truly rolling in history and detail, and crazy, crazy facts that you just think that couldn’t be real, but it is, and I wanted to sort of play that history out and unpack it in line with these fictional characters who obviously are not historical figures, but in some ways, represent elements of history in the sense that one of them will come from the world of banking. One of them comes from the world of medicine and business, which was an echo of the Eisenhower 10, which were the men that Eisenhower just sent lovely letters to, saying, “And in case of nuclear disaster, you will be in charge of agriculture.”
A.M. Homes:
So as though, please show this letter to your nearest farmer and he’ll know to give you his crops. I mean, I don’t know how that was really going to work, but I found all of it really interesting and wanted to work with it.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that your biological father was a bit big guy-ish and in that sense of a large scale confidence and ownership, sense of ownership or privilege of place, some other familiar themes in your autobiographical writing return in The Unfolding. Megan’s parents lose their infant son to an illness before she’s born, and that there’s another big plot surprise that I don’t want to give away. What made you decide to bring these themes into this book?
A.M. Homes:
I think again, so many things. On the one hand, I would say I wanted to explore some of those things, a little bit more. I still haven’t really done it in terms of the … what does it mean to me to be a replacement child or what is that experience like? At some point, maybe we’ll write some more autobiographic material about that, but I wanted to explore that a bit more. Also, in my adoptive family, my father was quite politically radical. So in some ways I have these two very, very different fathers. He was a lover of Ramparts Magazine and marching on Washington and there’s a wonderful little FBI file on him, for his early political work and so on.
A.M. Homes:
So he also had all kinds of political books around the house, but it would be like Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, which I have his copy of here and the report of the Warren Commission and all kinds of early nutball books about conspiracy theories and so on. So there’s that juxtaposition, and my biological father was definitely sort of a big guy in Washington. I mean, I didn’t know of course that the family had owned Washington, but he grew up there. He lived there and there is a Washington within Washington, which is sort of the local … people who are, it can be sort of a little bit like fixers. They own the parking lots. They own the land. They own the real estate and so on. He was definitely a part of that group of men.
Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I love about reading an author who has a large body of work is themes that pop up. When I was talking to Jacqueline Woodson about her books, I mentioned that the notion of air comes up a lot. In your books, the notion of time comes up a lot. Megan, the teenage daughter in The Unfolding has an experience upon seeing the Grassy Knoll for the first time, and her inner dialogue reminded me of how you describe time in The Mistress’s Daughter when Ellen returns and you write of Megan, “The Grassy Knoll is an example of the disappointment Megan felt today. The Grassy Knoll is less of a hill or a mound and more of a bump or at this point in time, a blip.”
Debbie Millman:
“Is that true or has the scale of things changed? Does a place compact and get smaller over time? Does history shrink?” What do you think now? Does history shrink, Anne?
A.M. Homes:
I don’t know. I mean, I think maybe it shrinks and then expands again, almost like an accordion or maybe there’s some weird hurdy gurdy guy playing, there’s all these people now who say that we’re living in some weird alternate game, who knows? What do I really think? Does history shrink? Well, I think history compacts, probably, just in the virtue of the way in which when we look back through our lives, it’s hard to hold things that are current at the same … almost like your hard drive, at the same volume and space as things that happen long ago. So they do compact. That bit about the Grassy Knoll it’s funny, because so much … what I write is really fiction, but that did happen to me.
A.M. Homes:
I went to see the Grassy Knoll when I was in Dallas, giving a reading and I had a Russian driver taking me to the airport who said, “You won’t go around again?” And I kept going around because I kept thinking, it’s going to make sense to me and then, finally, after we went three or four times, the guy was like, “Okay, let’s not … lady, I’m not spending the day driving in circles,” but that does interest me a lot, does history shrink? I’m not sure. Trauma, I think potentially is I don’t think trauma shrinks. I think that’s one of the problems with it, is that as we grow up, much of our history compacts, except for our trauma, which stays same size, no matter what.
Debbie Millman:
One of the other aspects of your book that I loved was the rat-a-tat-tat kind of almost like girl Friday dialogue. It’s so brilliant, and there’s this one bit that I wanted to read, not only for the dialogue, but also because of the content of what the gentleman are saying. So I’m just going to pick something up from right in the middle of the book. Actually, it’s more towards the end of the book and share it with our listeners and ask you about it. “Beau says, is that manipulating the mainstream media, is a cheap and effective way to get the message out. Exactly, the general says, a program I call the half baked potato re-stuffed, meaning that you eat it because you like the way it tastes, but you have no idea what you’re eating.” Then, there’s just shit we make up, Medsgar says. Science fiction, pure fantasy.”
Debbie Millman:
“How do you know the difference, Kasik asks. Difference, the general asks. What difference, between what is real and what is made up? I’m not sure that I should be the one to break this to you, the general says, but it doesn’t fucking matter. The only important thing is that people believe what you’re telling them.”
A.M. Homes:
Yeah, and that brings us-
Debbie Millman:
It’s so good.
A.M. Homes:
And that brings us to where we are now, right, exactly.
Debbie Millman:
Exactly. Exactly.
A.M. Homes:
And I find that terrifying.
Debbie Millman:
It is terrifying. You started this book 10 years ago. It’s an alternative history that you’ve somehow predicted as the present.
A.M. Homes:
Welcome to my life.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. There’s something else that you wrote in the book that really paused me, and really stopped me and kind of gave me chills. You said one of the characters is speaking to the other, another character and says, “Trust me, there are people who already know if Obama will go two terms. That’s who I want to be in business with, the people who know, the judge says.” Do you believe that? Do you that at that time people knew?
A.M. Homes:
In some ways. Yeah, sure. I mean, there are everything from, I mean true mathematics and statisticians and people that can look at political information and curves. I would say Obama going two terms is less of a mystery than what’s going to happen next, right?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
A.M. Homes:
At that point, we’re still in 2008, there was a reality that we all kind of agreed upon. Now, we’re living in a moment where there really is this thing called alternative facts, and there is also a kind of an alternative … literally, there is an alternative political reality that doesn’t follow the rules, the laws, any of the terms of free and fair voting, for example or classified materials. I mean any of the things that in some ways weren’t legislated because it never occurred to anyone that someone would walk away with that stuff. So I think we’re a little bit in a much more dangerous territory, and in a way, I would say if there were people who knew that about Obama, are there people who know what will happen next with the Republican party? Nope, there aren’t.
Debbie Millman:
Well, that’s what it seems like this cabal of men are trying to do, write that future, you write. The ancient Chinese general, Sun Tzu believed that the indirect approach to war was about deception and uncertainty, creating confusion, dividing allies. What you’re playing is the long game that evolves under the radar, the general says. The general … the most scariest person in this book is the general. Your politics are pretty much the opposite of these gentlemen. How did it feel to be creating this dialogue, which in some ways is really reprehensible, but also really accurate about what so many people believe?
A.M. Homes:
I guess it’s a really, really good question. No one has asked me anything like that. I feel like I was giving voice and identifying who’s having this conversation and what is being said and in a way, bringing forward what is just underneath the surface and absolutely, these things are happening and absolutely, these conversations are being had, and probably not by the people you wish were having them. I’m sure of that. I know it.
Debbie Millman:
The ending is a real surprise. I don’t want to give it away for anybody. Did it surprise you when you came up with the idea?
A.M. Homes:
I think to me the thing that’s interesting about the ending and I’m trying to figure out how to talk about it without giving anything away.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Yeah. Me too.
A.M. Homes:
A lot of people say to me, “How am I supposed to like these people?” I think I don’t want to talk about like because that’s way too contemporary, and if we have to like things then we’re never going to understand anything, but how do I feel for people? I do feel for all people, regardless of if I like them, I really am desperate to understand people that I don’t understand because I feel like I don’t want to just see my own reflection, I want to actually understand other people. So there’s that piece of it, but there’s a moment where the big guy begins to realize that he’s kind of a jerk and maybe more than a jerk, maybe more dangerous than a jerk. What does that mean? Because he doesn’t see himself that way and therefore, he’d have to have a reckoning within himself.
A.M. Homes:
So there’s that piece, and I think he thinks that now, that he’s sort of woken up a bit and he realizes he’s got this great daughter that she probably will follow in his footsteps, that she will … she’s had this moment, she’s voted, she’s coming to her own a little bit and she’s going to be just like him. I think the fact that he thinks that also tells us he’s still so incredibly oblivious and sort of self-focused, but he doesn’t realize that she may go and be something amazing, but it probably won’t be exactly what he thinks.
Debbie Millman:
That alternative is what I kind of hope for but again, we want people to read the book and find out for themselves-
A.M. Homes:
Well, exactly.
Debbie Millman:
It’s a page-turner. It really is a page-turner.
A.M. Homes:
I will just say, when I got to that, I was a little bit … every now and then as a writer, you write something, you think something and you get a sort of a tingly feeling. I’m like, “Oh my God,” and I was like, “Wow, that to me, was really cool.”
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I agree. I agree. Well, speaking of people becoming different people. My last question today is what I’m super curious about. I read that the living person you’d most like to meet is Mick Jagger.
A.M. Homes:
I love Mick Jagger. I’m not sure who I love more. I love the Rolling Stones. That was the thing I always … there were two things I wanted to be. One was a doctor and I used to go to that National Medical Library and read every night and then, I really wanted to be in the Rolling Stones. The problem was very low vacancies and no girls, right? I totally love Mick Jagger. I also really … Keith Richards has the same birthday as me. I think we have a lot in common and I was a drummer, and so Charlie Watts was also my guy. So the whole band-
Debbie Millman:
Well, there’s still time.
A.M. Homes:
I know.
Debbie Millman:
They need a new drummer.
A.M. Homes:
I know. I know.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you so much for making so much work that matters. Thank you for writing this really important breathtakingly, good book, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
A.M. Homes:
Thank you so much for having me.
Debbie Millman:
A.M. Homes’ latest novel is titled The Unfolding and you can read more about all of her extraordinary work on her website, amhomesbooks.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.