This Book Will Save Your Life

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For what seemed like a light-hearted romp, turned out to be a forensic examination and rumination of this reader’s own life. You know, Richard’s experiences in this story, would touch on so many people. I would be surprised if any one reader couldn’t find something to draw on here. Fascinating . . . I consumed these stories exactly like a spectator of a good fight or a neighbor peering through the hedge, and I felt sharply observed in turn. Homes, with her fierce sharp wit, reveals her characters’ deep flaws. No one gets away with anything and the spectacle is delightful.”—Molly Livingston, The Paris Review Daily

I think this brave story of a lost man’s reconnection with the world could become a generational touchstone, like Catch-22, The Monkey Wrench Gang, or The Catcher in the Rye. . . . And hey, maybe it will save somebody’s life.”–Stephen King I read this in a couple of sittings, but I'm on some kind of mad reading binge right now, about a book a day, so that may not mean much. For every time I started to think this book was just lightly entertaining there would come a scene so real and brutal it would hurt a bit. Broken child-parent relationships. Exes whose scent still lingers. Women sobbing in the produce section of a supermarket. Okay, do you ever get that feeling? That sense of… oh, I can’t find the right words, I can only describe it as a warm fuzzy. It’s this sense of childish hope, that people ARE good---and not good like someone letting you cut in line at the grocery store because you have 2 items to their 20 or someone following the correct etiquette of ‘merging into traffic’, but have you experienced true goodness? I have. I know I have. I’ve remembered coming home and being so excited to retell the story of something that renewed my faith in mankind. I remember grinning, not just smiling or smirking but full on ear-to-ear, pearly whites, make your face hurt, grinning.No, it won't. A.M. Homes's This Book Will Save Your Life can't even generate enough energy to save itself.

There are some heavy themes here – such as the relationship Richard has with his son Ben. One or two of those scenes are full on drama and very intense. The pent-up pain and resentment of a child who Richard left when he ran off from his ex-wife (Ben's mum), so many years ago. Esposito, Michael (March 21, 2009). " 'Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life' author Neil Strauss plans for the worst". Chicago Tribune. Archived from the original on April 8, 2009 . Retrieved March 26, 2009. This one made me stop and think. It made me seriously reflect about decisions I have made in my life and the impact my actions had on others, such as my kids. Sure, we sometimes think about these things, BUT this book made me REALLY think about it, wallow in it, really think of the consequences of my actions. To be sad in the moment. To be uncomfortable. To not like myself Home to Hollywood and Disneyland, Los Angeles may just be the American epitome of the controlled environment: man-made, manicured, synthetic. If the Great American Novel tends to tell of the outsider looking for and grasping at the American Dream, A.M. Homes’s This Book Will Save Your Life inverts such tales in a droll, satirical adventure of personal redemption that turns on the absurd. I am truly a writer of fiction, working from my imagination, making up events and characters. At the same time, perhaps more than other books I’ve written, This Book Will Save Your Life is philosophically very much in line with what I try to put forward in my own life. A confession: I am that person who talks to strangers in elevators, who stops crying people on the street and asks if they’re OK, who offers to help an old person home with their groceries. And I find that my offer of help is equally as often accepted as it is rejected.

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A.M. Homes has long been one of our most important and original writers of fiction. May We Be Forgiven is her most ambitious as well as her most accessible novel to date; sex and violence invade the routines of suburban domestic life in a way that reminded me of The World According to Garp, although in the end it’s a thoroughly original work of imagination.”–Jay McInerney, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Life The girl tries to guide the horse up the door and out of the hole. He won't go. She runs up and down the wooden door trying to show him that the ramp is safe. The horse is suspicious—he wants to come out, he starts to come out, but something keeps him in the hole. And he's catching on to the fact that he's trapped and is looking at the girl and at Richard, wanting someone to explain it in horse terms. Rich in humanity and humor . . . Homes combines an unfussy candor with a deliciously droll, quirky wit. . . . Her energy and urgency become infectious.”– USA Today

What if whoever wrote the story of Job had a sense of humor? Nixon is pondered. One character donates her organs. Another tries to grow a heart. A seductive minefield of a novel from A.M. Homes.”—John Sayles, author of A Moment in the Sun They get in line for the driving ride. You must be at least three years old and so high to go on this ride.While the girl is on the phone, the movie star talks to Richard. "I don't trust this hole. We need a helicopter to lift the horse out of the hole. How does that sound?"

Since her debut in 1989, A.M. Homes has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her keen ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of her touching and funny new novel, her first in six years. He gives away new cars, pays for his maid's hip replacement, sends the weary housewife to a spa. "This is the person he wants to be," Homes writes. "He wants to be able to do this for others, strangers, it doesn't matter who, and he wants to be able to do it for himself." His Good Samaritan impulse also inspires a series of impromptu rescue operations: A horse is trapped in a sinkhole, a hostage is trapped in a trunk, a woman is trapped in a bad marriage. These episodes are mildly amusing (for 15 minutes, he's a national celebrity, a punch line on Letterman), but because Richard is so imperturbable and his success so firmly guaranteed, the scenes never develop any real suspense. So, I’ve been trying to analyze this. It’s like I’m mad about the ‘what might have beens’, or I’m mad that I’m such a wuss about taking chances. Mostly I’m just mad. A big American story with big American themes, the saga of the triumph of a new kind of self-invented nuclear family over cynicism, apathy, loneliness, greed, and technological tyranny…this novel has a strong moral core, neither didactic nor judgmental, that holds out the possibility of redemption through connection.”–Kate Christensen, Elle Berton, Justin (March 15, 2009). " 'Emergency,' by Neil Strauss". Sfgate.com . Retrieved March 26, 2009.Hilarious . . . Homes writes in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and has the talent to pull it off.”– San Francisco Chronicle Since finishing the novel, I’ve been working on a memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter, a portion of which appeared in The New Yorker in December 2004. It’s the story of my biological parents, who gave me up for adoption and then came looking for me when I was in my early thirties. It is in part a story of what it means to be adopted, but it is also about identity, how all of us—not just adoptees—define and construct our sense of self and our family. Early on in the novel, Richard describes his eating habits and himself as “Mr. Healthy”: “I eat cereal that the nutritionist makes for me; it tastes like wood chips. I drink Lactaid milk. I never break the rules.” From his neighbor’s intravenous vitamin infusions to the assortment of pies proffered as goodwill tokens, food and eating take on a peculiar glow in the novel. In what ways does Homes use food and eating—sustenance—as a metaphor?