A. M. welcome to Waterstones.
Thank you very much for having me.
Well it's great to have you over here from the States. We have a new story collection, Days of Awe.
I actually first read your writing in a story collection Things You Should Know.
But you know the funny thing too is that there are a couple of the
characters that were in that book that are in this book and so I like that.
I mean there's there is a relationship of all of the collections of stories to each other.
Why did you write those two stories with the the same set of characters?
I don't know!
Back with the first collection of stories, The Safety of Objects,
there was the character in the story Chunky and Heat which really
sort of grew into being this character of Cheryl. And I think it's interesting
that I probably wrote that almost 30 years ago and it's taken me 30 years to
cover probably seven years in her life. And really the cycle of Cheryl in Chunky
and Heat and then the two stories in Things You Should Know which are Raft in Water, Floating
and The Weather Outside Is Sunny And Bright with this
shapeshifter which I actually wrote for Rachel Whiteread. Then in this collection
are Hello Everybody and She Got Away and it really is about Cheryl growing up and
trying to sort of figure out how does one achieve autonomy and leave home and
become an independent person.
And told in your own inimitable way because of course
You always have this sort of way of finding an image or a feeling
which is very, very different. Where does that - because what I remember from that first collection,
was this dark slightly twisted thing I noticed...
That's what people often say....
I want to read more of that, I thought.
I think what's interesting is you know the
notion of growing up or coming of age or achieving autonomy or any of those sort
of things which I've also more recently realized that you know we think of that
as something that happens when somebody becomes old enough to drink or old
enough to drive but the truth is it is an ongoing process in one's life, one
doesn't just suddenly come of age or grow up, we know plenty of people who are
40 who are still very much actively engaged of trying to figure out what
that might mean. So I think in the case of this character, the notion of growing
up and separating from the family is also filled with a sense of grief and a
sense of loss and so I think that that sort of bit with the parents at the end
and how does one move on - is kind of an articulation of that and
a visual articulation of that which we haven't really seen or talked about much
I think in literature.
Let's go to the title story: Days of Awe.
It's quite a bit longer than any of the other stories in the collection and it
looks at a war correspondent and a writer who are friends, they know each
other, and they meet at a conference which is about genocide and whilst
they're dealing with all this death they have this sort of affair, this very
quite sort of torrid sexual...
Yes they hook up at a genocide conference!
Obviously that throws up an extraordinary dichotomy, but maybe not so strange because
as the war correspondent says you know from his work what he sees in these
war-torn countries, is people having a lot of sex as a way of sort of
re-engaging with life. Was that why these two characters had to hook up?
No, I think despite that. I think that
they were friends and I think that some sense of
attraction was always there. But the hooking up is part of how do you move
the past into the present and into the future. And by that I mean sort of
historical past. So you know part of the genocide conference is looking at
multi-generational trauma and the way in which these characters go on this sort
of odd apple-picking adventure and drift back in time really into the language
and the lives of their grandparents and great-grandparents and
bring that forward. So I think there's that element of it and the
sex piece of it absolutely, in times of duress and and when people
were in the fallout shelters they absolutely were - they didn't call it
hooking up - there was a lot going on. And I think it was very much
about feeling alive. And then funnily enough, because this story you know
refers to these ten days in the Jewish religion between the High Holidays I
felt like I didn't know enough about it personally so I had to ask a couple of
rabbis, is this okay? And the rabbi's, they called and...
'There's a lot of sex in this story!' And I felt so embarrassed, and they go, 'But that's a good thing!'
Because apparently in the Jewish religion it's
considered like a good thing to have sex on the
Sabbath because that is your day of rest and, apparently, fornication. And also that
it is very much a life-affirming thing. So it was a funny sort of TMI from the
rabbis, because I'm like 'No, no don't tell me!' So that's definitely an element in the story, yeah.
These two people very much connect and they're very honest with
each other what they need, what they want from each other. You do that
quite a lot in your stories where the sort of the veneer of respectability or
of society is just sort of torn and you you try to expose something underneath.
Is that a - I was going to say is that a very American thing and I don't mean
that, there's a slightly different thing between the American and
English sensibilities about decorum or how we present ourselves.
You are often trying to show what's underneath aren't you?
I think it's more than something about
a per country idea but more about the sort of splits between our public and
private lives and the ways in which we all have sort of a sense of how we
present ourselves, how we want to be seen. I think all of the internet world has
added to that because now we sometimes have avatars of like
Oh this is who I am on Tinder, you know? And this is who I am in this place. And so there
really is often a split between who we are privately to ourselves and who we
are publicly and then what I'm often writing about is in a way some of the
sense of disappointment between how one wishes one would be and how one really is.
You know they talk about all these young people who find Facebook
incredibly depressing and basically have been known to kill themselves because
other people's feeds are so, you know, like 'my life is just great' and
there is that sense of how one is marketing oneself ostensibly to your own
friends in these ways; so like here I was having this lovely drink and
there's nobody just sitting at home going 'Oh my god, I don't know what's gonna happen to me.'
One story that felt to me to tap into something which is
I think very specifically American was A Prize For Every Player. A story in
which a family go ostensibly just on a shopping trip to the supermarket.
What I particularly liked was the bit at the end where the father of the family
after making a particularly kind of good speech in front of a bank of TVs,
suddenly the people start to gather around him and they suggest that he'd be
a great Presidential candidate. I cannot help but of course think
about you know the world that we live in today, the president that you have
right now, this idea of you know anybody who says the right thing could
become President. Am I drawing too close to comparison there?
Well the truly upsetting thing is I wrote that story quite a while ago. And I think I was
sort of intuiting a sense that many American people felt that the American
political system was literally not speaking to them. And unfortunately
I think somebody else also intuited that and the idea that an everyman could run
for president and could articulate what people were missing or that sense of
disappointment if things hadn't worked out, I think was a very real thing. And
it's disturbing to me the way it played out because, you know, there was a
piece of the story that I wanted to sort of write at some point and I was like oh this
should be a novel and one of the things that was going to happen next was that
this everyman was gonna have to get a history teacher because he actually
didn't know any history and he's gonna take like you know the seventh grade
history teacher on campaign with him to fill him in. I think our president
actually needs the history teacher, among other things.
Just to sort of look at short stories as a form in general because you've written novels and short
stories and obviously this collection is amassed from stories that you've written
over many years. What do you enjoy about short story writing as
opposed to the longer novels?
You know I think there's a couple things. One is
that there are things that you can do in a short story that you
wouldn't be able to sustain in a novel. So the story Days of Awe about the
genocide conference that wouldn't be a novel because it is very both compressed
but also the scale of it is limited to these few days at this conference and I
think we're you to try to make that into a novel it would become not even a whole
other thing it wouldn't sustain itself. So that's one of the questions always is
what is the arc and the shape of the story? The other thing is there's a
compression to stories and there's a use of language and kind of a tightness to
the way they're built, there is an architecture that's very different from
a novel, Because in a novel you really can wander off and come back and it's
sort of like it's like fly-fishing; you can just go *casts fly* and stand there for a few
hours and just see what happens and people like that because it's actually
pleasurable, they're standing there with you and oh we're on the lake and
it's a nice day and we're looking at all the... and we're contemplating these things but
in the short story it's already in motion and it needs to sort of move in a
certain way to a conclusion of some sort.
I mean as I said at the beginning
my first experience reading you was short stories and there is always that
kind of ,there is always a hook that makes me kind of go oh yeah, wouldn't
have thought of that and it's what brings you back to read more because
it's like what is the A.M. Homes take going to be on this?
So thank you for this collection and -
Well thank you for reading it! And I hope you read it too.
Well thank you so much for coming in
Thanks for having me.