Kurt Vonnegut Radio with Gabe Hudson - 31. A.M. Homes

Sep 13 2023 25 mins 2

Other Episodes

A.M. Homes is author of 13 books including most recently a novel: The Unfolding. Homes' 2013, May We Be Forgiven, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and her memoir, The Mistress's Daughter was published to international acclaim. Her work has been translated into 22 languages. Gabe talks to the iconic writer A.M. Homes about her new novel, The Unfolding, her renowned Barbie story, "A Real Doll," teaching at Princeton, and her position in the Writers Guild and the WGA strike.

Quotes from the episode

Why she wrote a Barbie story back in the day

I wrote it while I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa, and I was really just interested in how, when I was growing up, my mother was like, Barbie's not an appropriate toy for girls to play with, you can't have a Barbie, she's too sexual. And so I wanted to write this theoretically innocent story about a boy who was dating a Barbie doll.

How ppl responded to her Barbie when she was in U. of Iowa MFA

I went and got one, and I put it on the mantle in my apartment in Iowa City. And everyone who came over started doing things to Barbie and the first thing every person did was they took off her clothes and I was like, weird, like you come into my house and you undress my Barbie?

And then they would confess. They would tell me things that either they had done to their Barbie or that their sibling had done to Barbie. And so it immediately became a much more complicated and darker story about... Men and women, to sexuality, to all this kind of stuff that's just under the surface.

On why her latest novel, The Unfolding, is a political novel set in 2008

I also am very interested, as one sees in The Unfolding, in the domestic. And so this was a chance in this book to write big and small. Large scale American political landscape, and also American familial landscape, and how that all evolves. Because the novel is really about how we got to now. And the choice to set it in this period between the election inauguration in 2008, I wanted to begin to illustrate how the racism and sexism that was always latent, obviously, and had never really gone away, but when Obama was elected, it also became Much brighter and louder. I think older white men got really scared. And so there absolutely is this sense of what is the underlying threat.

Buy A.M. Homes’ new novel The Unfolding

Buy A.M. Homes’ The Safety of Objects

Read about A.M. Homes’s fictional encounter between Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger

Read about A.M. Homes’ Embrace the Absurd public art project w Laurie Anderson

Visit A.M.’s website and follow her on twitter

A.M.’s book recs:

Buy Randall Keenan’s Black Folk Could Fly

Buy Maria Popova’s Figuring

Buy Henry Hoke’s Open Throat

Rate/review Kurt Vonnegut Radio on podcast app of yr choice

Enjoy more Kurt Vonnegut Radio episodes: