The Dark, Hilarious and Brutally Honest ‘Emotional Sci-Fi' of Writer A.M. Homes

The award-winning author talks dark humor and humanity and what it’s like to revisit beloved characters

- JULIE BUNTIN

Imagine the worst disaster that could strike your family. Now multiply that by five, and you’re still barely in the ballpark of the chaos that Cheryl, the protagonist of A.M. Homes’s She Got Away, stumbles into when she returns home from college after an ominous phone call from her anorexic sister, Abigail.

The story is set in Los Angeles, a world that at first seems familiar—casually expensive, the heat “like a physical lozenge, a sedative”—but becomes, through Homes’s rendering, disarming, hilarious and very weird. The details are all dialed up—think realism after a couple of Adderall. There’s a kinetic energy generated by the relationship between tone (startlingly deadpan) and subject (grief, trauma, loss). Something has gone terribly wrong, and things are only going to get worse—and yet, from the dialogue to the details, what it really makes you want to do is laugh, the way horrible news can sometimes inspire hysterics. It’s a bit sinister how Homes implicates her readers with their own laughter. What does it mean to laugh at tragedy? Why is it sometimes a relief to laugh at the things that scare us the most? Homes’s writing—from her controversial novel The End of Alice, starring an imprisoned child molester, to her most recent novel, May We Be Forgiven, which opens with a man imagining his brother and sister-in-law having sex—regularly tackles the darker side of the human psyche. More boldly, she renders these situations with punchy, nerve-jangling humor. The effect is transgressive, exhilarating and, in a way, a relief. Everything sucks; people are capable of great cruelty and shocking selfishness. You might as well laugh.