You couldn’t make it up

The US author on big city excess in small-town America and returning to rural roots

Author AM Homes

THE LIST

Reading

The New Jerusalem by

Patti Smith.

Watching

Too much news. I should limit myself to an hour a day, but I am so concerned by the state of things that it’s like watching a car crash – horrible to see but I can’t look away.

Loving

The TV drama Killing Eve,

which is infused with darkness and has amazing performances.

Hating

What is happening in my country. ARE WE DOOMED to repeat the past? I am adopted. I was raised in a family whose maternal roots were in North Adams, Massachusetts. My grandmother, Jewel, had nine brothers and sisters and I grew up listening to stories told by my great-aunts and uncles of leading the cows out to pasture, delivering bottles of milk and carrying buckets of water up to the top of the mountain, where at the head of the Mohawk trail, they sold water to poor souls whose automobiles had overheated.

Recently my daughter, Juliet, decided she’d had enough of New York City and wanted to go to school in a place where the night was filled with the sound of hoot owls, rather than sirens and lovers’ spats. We went looking and found ourselves within 10 miles of our family’s first farm at a school that has at its centre a farm of its own, and where in the morning frost coats the grass and the fog burns it off by lunch. And so we are coming full circle, my child is having the past I never had, and returning to a landscape that is verdant and fertile and filled with dreams yet to be dreamed.

I AM ON A BOOK TOUR travelling America. Last night, I was in Narrowsburg New York, a town of 400, equal parts escaped hip Brooklynites and gun-toting Trump supporters. The event of the early part of the evening was Scissor Sisters’ lead singer, Jake Shears, reading from his memoir Boys Keep Swinging. Shears’s book celebrates his gay coming of age in a New York of sex clubs, cocaine and more. In this tiny town, where the main street is so quiet that the sounds of crickets compete with the buzz of ancient neon signs, the audience was half enthralled and half truly shocked. When it was over, I walked back to my B&B feeling we’d won one for ‘our side’. And then at 2.15am, the night was split by the siren of the local fire department about 20ft from my bedroom. This sudden punctuation, war cry, apocalyptic notification, a wailing that rose and fell for several minutes, set my heart slamming – and then slowly it ground to a stop, and the envelope of night closed again. I lay awake asking myself, should we be doing more? Our willingness to roll over and go back to sleep worries me. I can’t help but think we are failing to take notice, to act now, while there is still time to course-correct.

ALONG THE WAY I’ve been reading from my story A Prize for Every Player, in which Tom Sanford, a customer in a store, is nominated as the People’s Candidate for President, while he and his family are doing their weekly shopping. Sanford waxes poetic about the state of the union while standing in front of a bank of televisions in the electronics department, inspiring his fellow shoppers to campaign for change. I was caught off guard this week when something happened that went beyond the bounds of my imagination. In reality – not in fiction – a former Walmart store has been retrofitted with beds and is being used to house 1,500 boys, aged between 11 and 15, who have been taken from their parents by US Border Patrol. The job of writing fiction depends on the world as we know it remaining stable, so writers can depart the known and travel into a world of the imagination. When the real world pushes past the edge of what seems reasonable, it is no longer safe for the writer to look away – instead we stare at our own television screens in shock and despair. Days of Awe, by AM Homes, is published by Granta (£12.99). Homes will be speaking with Jeanette Winterson at Queen Elizabeth Hall at London’s Southbank Centre on Thursday

The job of writing fiction depends on the world as we know it remaining stable