Home is where the heart is

It’s somewhat difficult to square the author AM Homes with her novel May We Be Forgiven. While it has a rich vein of black humour, it also deals with difficult issues including murder, child sex abuse, sibling rivalry, infidelity and mental illness – not exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from an author as genuinely friendly as Homes!

May We Be Forgiven starts at a furious speed as the author piles disaster upon calamity. When George Silver kills a couple in a car crash, his brother Harry begins an affair with George’s wife. Tragedy results, and Harry ends up as guardian to his brother’s two young children, Nate and Ashley.
“It’s a little bit like writing a piece of music,” Homes observes. “You have to start at the right pitch or the right point of attack – tonal attack, not physical attack (laughs). If you get the pitch right, it begins to lay itself out.”
Homes believes that balancing the tragedy and the comedy, both in life and in art, is necessary.
“For me, it’s always a constant editing process. I’m writing every day, pushing out further but going back. There are various points where you’ve done a draft and you go back to the beginning looking at the evolution of the children, or the relationship of the brothers to see how they move through the story. That’s on a technical level.”
“On a more philosophical level, I look at in a sort of Buddhist perspective: life is suffering and we all do suffer. Then the question becomes, ‘What do you do with that?’. My way of tolerating the difficulties of life is, in part, to find the humour in it. I think it’s about allowing people to laugh, while telling them some pretty horrible... well not just horrible, some pretty true things about human behaviour, about the ways in which we fail each other – about hurt.”
Harry is a Nixon scholar and the book contains an irreverent re-imagining of the former US President as a short-story writer.
“Nixon was a very odd guy. He was so bitter and he was an unattractive person, not just physically but psychologically. He grew up in a religious Quaker family. His father was a farmer and apparently a very bitter man. There were two brothers who died in childhood, which affected him profoundly. I used what I knew about him to write this fiction for him. I kept thinking, ‘I could write a whole book of these stories. Don’t do that!’.”
Homes argues that the Nixon presidency has repercussions in American politics to this day.
“The Nixon/Kennedy debate was the first televised debate. Nixon had been sick and was notoriously a sweater; they put a lot of make-up on him, he sweated through the make-up and he looked horrible. Kennedy came across looking great. People who saw it on TV thought Kennedy had won, but people who heard it on the radio were sure Nixon had won. Even now, and without specifically explaining the reference, they say things like, ‘Romney and Obama agreed to keep the room a pleasant 62 degrees for the debate’, which is a reference to Nixon having felt that Kennedy kept the room too hot on purpose to make him sweat. So 50 years later, this little fragment of history echoes.”
“Nixon was one of the first to say out loud that if the president does it, it is not illegal. I think Bush believed that. Cheney, who was in the Nixon White House, clearly believed that. I find that fascinating. It doesn’t just end when the presidency ends, they all bleed into one another.”
Throughout the novel the perpetrators of crimes often go unpunished. When George’s temper leads him to commit a violent act, he is first hospitalised and later sent on a special programme called The Woodsmen, which is a hilarious mix of an Iron John survival getaway and a Hunger Games style reality show. While the novel pokes fun at the justice system, Homes passionately believes that American society’s attitude to crime and punishment is deeply flawed.
“I think the idea of warehousing people and hoping that their behaviour will change is just ridiculous. Why would it? With most crimes there is an economic basis, there is a reason people are doing things and often it’s that they need money. If you gave people better skills and more of a sense of self-worth that would be one of the ways to combat that. Instead we just drum in, ‘You’re a bad person; you should get punished’. So fine, they get out and stay on the right side of the law for a while, but then they’re broke so they do something. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
“Crime is an expression of a kind of despair and frustration. You have to provide education, you have to provide health care, you actually have to take care of people. But in America if you take care of people, apparently you are a communist country.”
One of Homes’ most notable novels, The End Of Alice, deals with a child molester and murderer. What made Homes decide to revisit this territory?
“What interested me was Ashley being in this very vulnerable position and the way what seems like a benign situation turns into something else. Harry thinks it’s so nice she has a friend – he has no idea. I think the fact that the teacher goes unpunished is par for the course. Look at the whole thing that’s unrolling with the BBC. People know things and maybe somebody gets a reprimand, but people cover for them. Often the person who is the victim is somehow blamed.”
Throughout May We Be Forgiven, official or legal families are sites of struggle. However, Harry finds redemption by creating a hodgepodge family of his own.
“I myself am quite traditional, I am a firm believer in the idea of marriage – but family can be whoever you want it to be. Family isn’t limited to the biological and I like the idea that it is increasingly a family of choice.
“It seems so often that family conflict can come to a head at holidays. Every family has a relative who is always drunk or a person who doesn’t show up or an aunt who always picks a fight. That’s what I love about families too – despite all the efforts to be on one’s best behaviour, it all comes out!”

May We Be Forgiven is out now, published by Viking.