Novelist finds home in books

NEW YORK — A.M. Homes doesn’t court controversy. But it finds her nonetheless. She published her first work at age 19, a play called the “Call-in Hours,” and was promptly threatened with a lawsuit over it by the reclusive writer J.D. Salinger for including both Holden Caulfield and Mr. Salinger himself.

“He threatened to sue, to shut down the production of it,” she said. “It was sort of terrifying. He was one of my heroes.”

Mr. Salinger didn’t sue, but she eliminated Caulfield and the author’s name from the play, and the show went on for about six weeks near her home in Chevy Chase.

“That was the beginning, my welcome to the literary world,” she said. And she was off, quickly becoming known for her explosive, often disturbing stories.

“It’s all out there floating around,” Miss Homes said. “I just organize it. It’s not about liking the characters. I care for them, but it’s not my job to create people that are likable.”

Miss Homes, now in her mid-40s, is again causing a stir with her latest work, “This Book Will Save Your Life.” Such a title by any other writer would mean the reader was in for sweet inspiration. But with Miss Homes, chances seem slim. The title must be a trick. This is the same woman who showed readers the deranged mind of a pedophile in “The End of Alice.”

But, while the characters in “This Book” are flawed and often bizarre, there’s nary a trace of the perverse.

In fact, the book is downright uplifting.

Miss Homes said it comes from the same observations that fuel her other novels. She’s always been an observer, she noted, often on the sidelines because she was shy. Miss Homes used writing as a way to reach people. “On the other hand, you’re still sort of protected in your bubble,” she said of writing. “It just felt safer.”

One can imagine Miss Homes as the young girl Amy, with long dark hair, sitting up in her room at a desk, scribbling away for much of the afternoon. She was a published author at 15, a collection of poems which she now jokingly said she wishes she could have back.

And she had an impressive slew of pen pals, including Pete Townshend and John Sayles. “I used to write to strangers all the time. All kinds of people,” she said. But the letters weren’t your typical rantings from a boy-crazy teenage girl.

“I wasn’t like ‘Oh you were so wonderful,’ it was like ‘Today at school, Susie was mean to me,’” Miss Homes said.

Miss Homes has one brother and said she comes from a very creative bunch. “I come from a funny family from Washington. My parents were very left wing,” she said. “We couldn’t eat grapes not picked by union workers, that sort of thing.”

She attended the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop and later taught at Columbia while she wrote novels, but stopped to focus on writing full time.

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