I picked up a copy of The Missouri Review (the site does not have the new issue up yet) today at B&N strictly because of the interview with author A.M. Homes. (I knew whatever else was inside would be good as well as I've been a fan of the journal for years.) I am not a huge fan of Homes's fiction - her short stories sometimes seem to be too honest, if that makes any sense. I feel like she's peeled back layers that are just too graphic and I get left feeling unsettled by the whole reading experience. I think she is a good writer, she just isn't necessarily a writer for me, not unless I'm ready to handle what she has to say - it just seem sqwidgy to read her work sometimes! But I was very intrigued to peek inside her head. After my recent entry about fiction vs memoirs, I was pretty surprised to read that Homes' has some major on opinions on what has become a big topic in the literary world since she gave this interview.

Homes writes mostly fiction, but as I said her fiction reads as incredibly honest work. The End of Alice has drawn quite a bit of attention over the years as it deals with "the exploits of two pedophiles". She says in TMR interview that she was on a radio show with Wisconsin Public Radio shortly after the book came out and had a terrible time convincing both the host and the callers that the book was fiction. This didn't really bother her too much - it meant the book had hit close to home and stirred up strong feelings among readers - but it did seem odd. She has some thoughts on why peoples seem to feel this way about their fiction however:

"All of the notions of what fiction and nonfiction are have gotten very murky. We live in a world that has become increasingly fact oriented and fact based, and people are comforting themselves with fact in a way that we used to do with fiction. The cycle of the memoir and our interest in nonfiction as opposed to fiction is shifting. But I'm not sure people exactly know what it's all about."

In light of recent revelations about the light truth requirement and pitiful fact checking of memoirs (all hail Oprah's decision that "emotional truth" is what matters most), Homes' comments are even more interesting. We seem to want nonfiction to convince us that everything is okay, that the world makes sense, but we don't want to know for sure if it is true or not - we just want someone to tell us it is true, we just want someone to let us believe it is true.

Suddenly the past few years makes an awful lot of sense to me - Weapons of Mass Destruction, anybody? Honest men in Congress? Or worst of all - "just hold on New Orleans, we are coming to save you."

Nonfiction my ass. Not one part of our national lives has been nonfiction in years and now it has finally even made its way to the stupid memoirs we read in airports and keep on our nightstands. Nothing is true anymore, truth itself is a lie.

Excuse me while I get really really depressed.

Something else that Homes' says in the interview really struck a chord with me as well:

"The diffference between fiction and nonfiction for me is that writing nonfiction causes nausea. Writing fiction, I feel to be more accurate and more revealing. You go into your head and your imagination and for me that is incredibly liberating. In nonfiction you're stuck in reality and researching reality. My nature is to be a novelist and I'm not that comfortable with nonfiction."

I don't mind writing essays - on some subjects I really quite enjoy them - but I do wholeheartedly agree with Homes' assertion that fiction can be more honest than nonfiction. (For a writer anyway - no more political talk in this entry, I promise!) Seth Kantner and I came to the same conclusion during our conversation on writing about Alaska, and he wrote his book, Ordinary Wolves, as fiction for many of the same reasons that my book is fiction. It was just impossible to be that honest without it being fiction - it never could have been written without the freedom of fiction to allow the author to say why he thinks things are the way they are, and why people acted a certain way, and what might have to happen to change all of that.

To tell the truth (as he knows it), Kantner had to make his book fiction. That's how Tim O'Brien wrote his war stories, and it is certainly how I write as well. It was just pretty cool (and weird in light of all these recent thoughts) to see that A.M. Homes feels much the same way.

Don't you just love it when that whole serendipity thing happens?