L.A. EVENT & GUEST INTERVIEW: A.M. HOMES

In her memoir The Mistress’s Daughter, A.M. Homes writes about being found by the woman who gave her up at birth for adoption. To be sure, such lost and found stories are abundant these days, but there has never been anything common about Homes.

With the clarity, unflinching insight, and quiet ferocity that characterizes all her work, Homes relates the delicate, difficult relationships that develop between herself and her birth parents over a number of years; the maelstrom of issues about identity that the experiences raise; and the genealogical (and possibly ontological) quest Homes undertakes to find “a context, a history, a way of understanding how all this came to be."

At one point in the memoir, Homes makes an appearance at a bookstore; when an audience member asks to what extent her fiction draws on her personal life, she answers "I have yet to write anything that is truly autobiographical." Yet readers familiar with her oeuvre know that almost all of her work explores, in one way or another, the relationship of parent to child, or adult to child – whether the father estranged from his son in This Book Will Save Your Life, or the nuclear family melting down in Music for Torching, or the adult seducers and the young objects of their attentions in The End of Alice, or the therapist in The Country of Mothers, who becomes convinced her new young patient is her daughter, given up for adoption years earlier.

Two fans of Homes, FOTEVs Darcy Cosper and Janelle Brown, spoke with the author, who is in Los Angeles this week for events at the Hammer and Skylight Books, about the line between fiction and autobiography – and why the crossing over of the two should neither be assumed by readers, or abused by writers.

How conscious were you of the parent/child relationship as a theme in your work?

When I'm writing fiction I am really am making things up. It's about being a good storyteller. But I know that there are pieces within the stories that come from my life, in terms of larger themes and ideas. Looking at authors I admire a lot – Roth or DeLillo or Dostoevsky – writers do tend to work with the same things again and again. You keep writing them until you solve for X – like it's an algebra question.

So how conscious were you of these themes as an autobiographical exploration of your adoption?

I'm not so convinced that you can look at those themes in my work and tie them all to the memoir. The memoir is a fragment of my life, it's about a specific incident and time. The fact of my being adopted permeates my life but it's just a slice of it, like a pathology slice. I'm not as invested in that notion as others might be.

I think we've really lost track of what fiction is. There are an enormous number of writers doing fiction that is based on their lives in an overt way. But there is fiction that is truly fiction and about the imagination, and overall in our culture – especially with reality television and politicians that mispeak – this has become blurry in a way that's inexcusable. There’s no way we should be not knowing the difference between something that's made up and something that's not.

Are you talking about the fake memoir trend?

When did it no longer become OK to say this is a story I made up? That woman in Oregon who made up the gang memoir, why was it not good enough to say she has a great imagination, she really captured the life of this girl? Did she really think this was her story? It's as if a novel is no longer a valid form. The true story is no longer valid.

So how has this experience affected your writing since then?

I have no idea. I really am a fiction writer so I don’t think about how, say, the experience of having a partner with cancer has affected my writing, or how has the neighbor's dog dying affected me? Things that are important to me are not necessarily overtly apparent in the work or what I'm writing about. The greatest pleasure to me in being a fiction writer is inhabiting lives other than my own. I think I am in the classic sense a fiction writer. That said, the themes are my own themes, but I can't say they're there only because of my being adopted. It's also my own whole mental structure.

Throughout the book, but in particular in the section "The Electronic Anthropologist," I was struck by the sense of urgency to your quest, yet the goal was nebulous, ambiguous, existential. What you hoped to find or feel is gestured at, but not made explicit. What it is you think you were looking for?

I can't say I was looking for a personal thing. But I am by nature a curious person: It's all relevant to me.

When I was doing all this research, down in the records halls, I met an enormous number of people who seemed like they were trying to find things that would confirm to them either what they already knew about themselves or else to push themselves further away from what they knew about their families. To connect or reject. For me, I was literally looking for the story of my family and seeing how many dots I could connect. It's a very different kind of story than when you have your family history at your dining room table every day.

While doing this, everybody's family histories became interesting to me. Looking through birth and death records you learn when people come to a country, what they died of, how they lived. There is human drama everywhere. I found that moving and heartbreaking -- not necessarily about relatives of mine that I found, but about American history and how people came to this country.

The IN RE stories – those are the lunacy files. You could read through them and find out that someone from Germany or Poland who had just got here, probably because they were escaping something, believed that someone was chasing them, talking to them. These people had no money, they came all the way here with such miserable experiences -- frankly I'm surprised everyone didn't go nuts. It's a piece of the immigrant experience that doesn’t get talked about, the people lost along the way.

Is there a direct relationship between this sort of adoptee search and the work that a writer does? For example, in the book you compare the search for identity and the construction of narrative, recalling the Joan Didion line "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

I think as an adopted person and as a writer you are searching for information, for clues that will tell you a bit about who you are, as though what you know of yourself isn't enough. You look for details and story.

The difference between this book and a lot of other memoirs is that this memoir is written by a writer, while a lot of memoirs are written by people who aren't really writers so it's just about the story. But there is a lot about writing, craft, in my story.

A lot of people have commented to me that this book gives voice to an experience that is a primitive one that doesn't have a lot of language associated to it – how do you find language about what it's like to be taken from your mother and given to someone else at such an early age? The child can't tell you what they know, so how does an infant grieve?

So, you were trying to find a writer's language to these kinds of experiences?

Exactly.

Your memoir seems very much a story about identity being determined as much by how others see us as how we see ourselves. Given that, and that it's been out for a year now, how has public response to the book changed your sense of the experience, and perhaps your ideas about yourself?

It hasn't. That's probably a healthy sign. Historically I write novels, not about myself. To publish a book that is so personal and intimate is weird. I don't know why people would normally do that. I thought I would do it because it would have meaning for other people. And it has – people are constantly talking about it to me like it's different from a novel. With a novel, people say "I read it, I have a novel too." When people read this book, the first thing they want to do is to tell me their own story. I was warned this would happen and I would hate it, but I actually don’t hate that part at all. I'm happy to hear someone else’s story.

I'm shy about the fact that it's out there ahead of me. If you have a story about yourself that you choose to tell people at a cocktail party, that's one thing, you control it; but a story that's out there floating around to be consumed by anyone, that's another thing. I decided not to do a big paperback tour, because on the hardback tour I felt like I was being interrogated in many languages with the same questions – like I was being shaken over and over again to see if anything else would fall out of my pockets, as if there was more to say. And I didn't have more to say. It is just a story.

I think of it as a book that's about two people I didn't really know and a life I didn't really have. And as a novelist, that's what's really interesting about it. For other people it's as if they had juicy gossip on me. If only they really knew.

Honestly, I can't wait to get back to fiction.