Homes_1

ER: Did you have a particular author or book that made you want to
become a writer?

AMH: No. I was always a big reader but it was never a particular book or story. I
think for me it was just a way of finding myself. It was really just the pleasure and
joy of it. But no particular one thing.

ER: In an interview after the publication of Things You Should Know you
described yourself as being “disaster focused.” Is that still the case? What
are you interested in now?

AMH: (Laughs) That’s very funny. The new novel that’s coming out in the
spring, you could call it disaster focused. I didn’t think about that, and I wouldn’t.
It’s a novel that’s set in California, and I would say that one of the things that
interests me about California is that everyone says it’s a great place to live because
of the weather but yet the natural disasters are of almost Biblical proportion. I
always thought of it as a metaphor for the external world echoing the disaster of
the internal world in some way. But now I’m really not so sure of that, because it
simply means that we’re all in really bad shape—on the inside. It does interest me
and I think it’s always what the atmosphere is capable of that interests me.

ER: In light of the recent spate of natural disasters, such as Hurricanes
Katrina and Rita, have they changed your approach or focus?

AMH: The L.A. book took me about four years to write. And no joke, pretty
much everything that I wrote has come true. And that’s not the first time that has
happened to me. I finished the book in October of last year and then all through
the fall, all these things that weren’t supposed to happen in California happened.
They had rain out of season, all those houses falling down hillsides—crazy, crazy
things. And no joke, that’s all in the book; those events all happened afterwards.
My editor actually e-mailed me because there’s a saber-tooth tiger in the book,
and you know, saber-tooth tigers are supposed to be extinct. And then all of a
sudden for a while there was this huge tiger roaming the streets of Los Angeles. So
my editor says ‘You’ve done it again.’ I think that piece of it for me is just
plucking out what’s already out there. But I’m not really focused on disasters
anymore.

ER: I’ve read in the Times that you’ve written a memoir to be released in
early 2006. Tell me about your experience writing a memoir.

AMH: I wouldn’t recommend it. This is my first memoir and I had previously
written a book on Los Angeles that was a sort of travel memoir, but it wasn’t the
gory details of my life. And now I’m working on a book in which part of it was
published in The New Yorker last year about my family. But I’m not kidding—I
wouldn’t recommend it. I find it incredibly, incredibly difficult and slow-going.
And on the one hand you want to get it right in terms of both the facts and other
people’s experiences. And the other thing is that it means something to other
people. I’m not particularly interested in myself, and that’s really why I write
fiction. My fiction is not autobiographical. I don’t have that need or that desire.
And I think that’s all the more why it’s incredibly hard for me to do this. I find it
brutal. I’d much rather write a novel.

ER: When The End of Alice came out, you received a barrage of questions
and criticisms about the book’s ties to reality.

AMH: It’s my impression that we’ve lost sight of what fiction is. We somehow got
used to a kind of novel that was very autobiographical and the assumption was
always that there was some piece of it that was true to the author’s experience,
rather than the more classic world of the imagination. With that novel in particular,
people found the subject matter so difficult and upsetting that they assumed that
only somebody who had some sort of direct experience with it would write it. But
in fact, if I had had that direct experience I never would have been able to write it.
Being an outsider and trying to understand it allowed me to write it.