A.M. Homes on the emotional challenges of writing dark material

Her novel The End of Alice is “a tale told by a pedophile in his twenty-third year in a maximum security prison. He is intelligent; he is witty; he is profoundly dangerous.

“Beyond the reality of his stark cell and the violent perversion of the other inmates lies his imagination, which he turns to his past, to an ‘accident’ with a little girl named Alice, and now to the erotic life of a nineteen-year-old suburban co-ed who draws him into a flirtatious epistolary exchange.” [Summary from her site amhomesbooks.com]

A.M. Homes admits in an interview that “Alice” is “a profoundly disturbing book. It’s a serious book, an upsetting book… Writing fiction, to me, means being inside other people’s heads. But this head was so completely unfamiliar and dark…

“It was really, really hard. I remember feeling awful by the end of it. I was depressed and sad. I went into a bookstore to do some research, looking up stabbings and forensic reports, the details of these sorts of things, and I remember standing in the bookstore, literally crying.”

She adds, “I once jokingly told someone that every book is like a relationship. They’re four or five years long - that’s not so bad. They’re serious. They demand a lot of attention. But I remember thinking that I wanted to have one with someone who’s not so crazy and peculiar and demanding.” [From A. M. Homes Is a Big Fat Liar, by Dave Weich, Powells.com]

In an Elle magazine interview [Crimes of the Heart, by Randall Kenan], she responded to a question about people describing the novel as shocking: “It scared me sometimes when I was writing it; at times I had to stop—I frightened myself. I don’t know that shock’s such a bad thing… but I thought intellectually and artistically that this was the most ambitious book I’d tried.”

Her new book is The Mistress’s Daughter: A Memoir

[Photo of Homes by Marion Ettlinger.]

Some actors also talk about being deeply and intimately engaged with a character, and how that can be dangerous for their mental health and equilibrium.

Nicole Kidman, for example, once commented, “Unfortunately the thing that makes me want to be an actor, in terms of wanting to be consumed, is also what can destroy you because it becomes almost too hard.”

Posted by Douglas Eby | | 04.02.07 | Share This