艾美·贺姆

艾美·贺姆（1961年12月18日—）是美国一位著名女作家。

生平

出生于华盛顿，1985年毕业于莎拉劳伦斯学院，1989年投入创作行列，处女作《积克》是一本探讨家庭与性的小说，1996年出版的《爱丽斯的终结》描写儿童性侵犯亦引起争议，2013年，她凭第六部小说《愿我们可以被原谅》获得了女性小说奖。

Amy M. Homes (pen name A. M. Homes; born December 18, 1961) is an American writer best known for her controversial novels and unusual short stories, which feature extreme situations and characters. Notably, her novel The End of Alice (1996) is about a convicted child molester and murderer.

Homes, who was adopted at birth, met her biological parents for the first time when she was 31 and published a memoir, The Mistress's Daughter (2007) about her exploration of her expanded "family." Her novel May We Be Forgiven was published by Viking Books in 2012; its first chapter was published in the 100th issue of Granta (in 2008; edited by William Boyd), and was selected by Salman Rushdie for The Best American Short Stories 2008. The novel won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2013. Her latest novel, The Unfolding, was published by Viking on September 6, 2022.

Early life

Amy Michael Homes was born in 1961 in Washington, D.C. and given up for adoption at birth. She was raised in Chevy Chase, Maryland and, after graduating from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, attended American University.

Homes received her Bachelor of Arts in 1985 from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied with author Grace Paley and then earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Career

Homes has written both short stories and novels; the former published in such leading magazines as Granta, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and BOMB.

Novels

She wrote her first novel, Jack, when she was 19, but it wasn't published until 1989, when she was 28 and had already published some short stories. An exploration of family life and sexuality, Jack features a son of divorced parents who learns that his father is gay. The book was critically praised and is still featured in school and college reading lists. Homes wrote a screenplay film adaptation by the same name, produced in 2004 for the Showtime cable network.

Her second novel, In a Country of Mothers (1993), centers on an adopted girl and her psychotherapist, who begins to think this patient might be the daughter she herself had given up at birth. (Homes was writing this novel, and its publication was in production, before her own birth mother tracked her down, in 1992.)

Homes's 1996 novel The End of Alice is narrated mostly by a convicted child molester and murderer, imprisoned in the West Block of Sing Sing. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham described this work as:

"...dark and treacherous as ice on a highway. It establishes A. M. Homes as one of the bravest, most terrifying writers working today. She never plays it safe, and it begins to look as if she can do almost anything."

It aroused considerable controversy and received mixed reviews due to its thorny subject matter and objectionable protagonists (in the UK, bookseller W.H. Smith refused to carry it).

Homes published the first chapter of her 1999 novel Music for Torching as a short story in The New Yorker. The novel features characters who appeared in the short stories of her first collection, The Safety of Objects, including a suburban couple that deliberately burns down their own house. Jill Adams in The Barcelona Review described it as having Homes's "trademark style of wry humor, applied to the uncanny dissection of suburbia’s facade." Britain's The Observer found it "immensely disturbing." People magazine called the novel "haunting," and Gary Krist in The New York Times described it as""...[a] nasty and willfully grotesque novel. The fact is, I was at times appalled by the book, annoyed by it, angered by it. Its ending struck me as cynical and manipulative. But even so, I found myself rapt from beginning to end, fascinated by Homes's single-minded talent for provocation."He concluded with a caveat: "In her last two novels, the desire to outrage is so conspicuous that it risks obscuring her powerful gifts as a novelist."