It might be novels that come to mind when one envisions “summer reading,” but what’s more suitable to the timeline of a traveler—a stop-and-go hour snatched while waiting for a delayed plane; hot stretches on the sand between cool dips in the water—than short fiction? The compact nature of the short story requires precision and economy of language; the result, when it’s done well, can contain all the force of a punch to the gut. A reader might find herself longing for more—and sometimes the writer herself finds she’s not quite ready to leave that brief, intense world behind. AM Homes, whose third short story collection, Days of Awe, is out in paperback next week, has found herself returning again and again to a character she first wrote about in 1989. “Obviously when I started,” she says, “I didn't anticipate that.”
Homes is a longtime Vanity Fair contributor and the author of seven novels and two previous story collections. She also has writing and producing credits on various TV shows including The L Word and Falling Water. It’s a bibliography that suggests a hunger for new territory—and yet, throughout her varied career and over the span of thirty years, she has dedicated five stories to one set of characters: a Los Angeles-dwelling girl named Cheryl, nicknamed Chunky, and the family and friends in her orbit.
“In my mind, it was a little bit like Salinger was with the Glass family,” says Homes, who gives Salinger (not to mention Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and Oedipus) a run for his money when it comes to picking apart the strange intricacies of individual family dynamics. In her 2012 novel, May We Be Forgiven, a man finds his wife in bed with his brother and murders her. He goes to jail, his brother steps in to take care of his house and teenage children. In a 2004 essay for the New Yorker called “The Mistress’s Daughter,” Homes, who was adopted as an infant, wrote about meeting her biological parents for the first time. Families are ripe territory to plumb—they’re universal, if not universally similar. “Everybody has one of some sort,” she says.
The five stories dwell in a hot, fluorescent world in which extreme plastic surgery is de rigueur, and outward presentation is paramount. There are sexual fantasies and shapeshifting women and death by a poisonous snake. “Her thighs spread across the vinyl ropes of the lawn chair. In the heat they seem to melt into the plastic, seeping out from under her shorts, slipping through the vinyl as though eventually she'll begin dripping fat onto the lawn,” read the opening lines of “Chunky in Heat,” Homes’ first story in the cycle, written in 1989 and published in The Safety of Objects. The story sticks close to Cheryl, a young girl exploring her body (physically and mentally) while she lies next to the pool. “Every day when she comes home from school, she puts on her bikini and lies in the pool—it stops her from snacking,” Homes wrote a decade later in “Raft in Water, Floating,” inspired by a Malerie Marder photograph. It and a companion story, “The Weather Outside is Sunny and Bright,” appear in her collection Things You Should Know. In Days of Awe, Chunky and her family—her parents and fatally thin older sister, Abigail, who only eats foods with less than 10 calories—are back in “Hello Everybody” and “She Got Away,” which track Cheryl from early adolescence into college, her family ever-more obsessively concerned about their—and her—appearance. At one point, a bad car accident lands Cheryl in the hospital. Her face, her mother says, is ruined. She demands a plastic surgeon. “Leave it,” Cheryl pleads, to no avail. “I’ll look like I’ve lived.”
“[Cheryl] could be really fat or really thin and it wouldn't matter,” says Homes, who was fascinated with the interplay between personal image and larger cultural conceptions of beauty and body size, and how the preoccupation with weight and physical optimization hasn’t diminished in the three decades since she’d started writing about Cheryl. “They're very pushed out, Kardashian style,” she says of the family, whose constant body modification belies deeper emotions, including the death of a third child, their only son. It’s about “an absence of identity,” Homes says. “I'm always writing, really, about human behavior and the human heart. And the dissonance, often, between our behavior and our heart.”
Last month, Homes dove into the family once more with an operatic adaptation in collaboration with the New York-based collaborative Experiments in Opera. Homes describes the resulting production of Chunky in Heat as “a weird demented musical; it's like if John Waters was a 13 year old girl.” The set was a splash of surreal neons; the score was composed by Paula Matthusen, Jason Cady, Shelley Washington, Erin Rogers, Aaron Siegel and Matthew Welch. The process, Homes says, of condensing the stories into the libretto was both adaptive and generative: the opera is “almost like a super concentrated perfume that I just hope doesn't smell like a skunk.” Hardly. “Everything about this production is so uniformly superb,” wrote one critic at the Observer.
After thirty years of getting into these characters’ heads, the addition of the live music and singers added a new dimension that surprised her. “It adds so many layers psychologically,” she says, “and a different intimacy and vulnerability that I hadn't anticipated.”
In the days after the opera’s opening, I wonder whether this reworking of the stories signaled an ending for Homes. The finale of “She Got Away,” the last of the Chunky stories thus far, is, for certain characters, grim. Is this the end of Chunky, I ask in an email, or does Homes think she’ll revisit her interesting, interested character in some other future? “I never expected to visit her and her family multiple times over three decades,” she writes. “I wouldn’t rule anything out. I never think I’m done with any character, just that I’ve found a safe place to leave them for a while.”
— Inside the multi-million dollar, totally messed up renovation of the Plaza Hotel
— Grace Kelly’s granddaughter pays tribute with timeless wedding style
— Can J. Crew find itself—and its customers—again? Read our investigation
— How Meghan Markle reveals Donald Trump’s big royal lie
— From the Archive: Swearing off the party circuit with Paris Hilton and her fiancé Paris
— Why Chernobyl’s unique form of dread was so addicting
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss a story.
