AM Homes is an early riser. This is entirely fitting for an author whose initials are suggestive of pre-noon activity. When we speak over FaceTime, it’s 8 o’clock in the morning where she is, in a studio she owns on Long Island, an hour’s drive from her home in Manhattan. This is where she comes to write, and she does not come alone. “I have this little friend with me,” she says, pointing to Grace, a Labradoodle-ish dog with fur the colour of ice cream cones. “She likes to go to the beach first thing.”
Homes, 60, is so gregarious a proposition on screen that the slim parameters of an iPhone can barely contain her. As she talks, she leans first this way then that, hair all over the place, and often she looms in for an extreme close-up, the sun glinting off her blue-tinted glasses. Born with the name Amy, she says she has always gone by AM, and that it’s what everyone calls her, “even my [college-aged] daughter”. When I ask what the M stands for, her reply is a deadpan fib: “Middle!”
