AM Homes, 60, is the author of 12 books, including 1996’s The End of Alice, narrated by a jailed paedophile, Music for Torching (1999), about the build-up to a school shooting, and May We Be Forgiven, which won the 2013 Women’s prize for fiction, leaving the judges “laughing out loud [in] fear or horror as much as anything else”. Her new novel, The Unfolding, follows a Republican donor plotting a coup in the wake of Barack Obama’s election. Homes, raised in Washington DC, spoke from New York, where she teaches at Columbia University.
What led you to write The Unfolding?
I was trying to illustrate how we got to where we are now by looking at 2008, but I’d started it well before Donald Trump was even seeming to be a candidate. It’s not the first time I’ve been writing about something that then comes into being in some way: Music for Torching came out three weeks before the Columbine shooting. I started experimenting with the ideas in the story A Prize for Every Player [collected in Days of Awe, 2018], where a guy at a store is nominated to run for president by other shoppers because they feel no one in the political establishment understands them. That sense isn’t new, but what was on my mind was the way that the problem has been intensified by the influx of dark money, which incentivises American politicians to care for corporations rather than people.
The novel’s title refers to a family drama as well as a political one…
You can go down a rabbit hole with politics, because it’s the stuff of nonfiction. I was talking to Jeanette Winterson about how hard it was and she said: “Stay with the characters!” It made me pay more attention to the women in the book: the [protagonist’s] mother and daughter feel paralysed by the power of the men in their life and the secrets they’ve been asked to keep. Meghan is up against that horrible moment young women come to – these days especially – when they’re led to believe they can do anything and then see, as they become teenagers, that it’s somehow harder to claim space that’s not sort of sexualised or playing some sort of role. We want to believe that opportunity exists for women now; it does and it doesn’t.
Did you feel overtaken by events when you saw the Capitol riots?
This novel took a long time to write – 10 years – and I had wanted it to be out before the last election: I was so upset, like: “Oh man, the timing’s all messed up now.” But after 6 January my friend said: “It’s really good it didn’t come out; you’d be in big trouble.” When I was first talking to my editors about my idea, they listened carefully and literally said: “I dunno, it sounds kinda out there… you don’t write science fiction.” That diverted me to other things – I teach full-time, I write TV [Homes has written for The L Word, among other series] and have a family – but I couldn’t let it go, and the horrifying thing was it started not to be science fiction at all.
