The first 50 pages of this book are explosive in events: basically, as the main character starts sleeping with his sister-in-law, his brother causes a car accident that kills two people and gets put in the psychiatric ward because he is very dazed in the aftermath. One night shortly after the accident, he escapes from the hospital only to discover his brother and wife in his bed and murders his wife. He is immediately returned, of course, to the psych hospital, and in a strange turn of events that no one questions, the main character is given custody of his brother’s two children.
As he blunders through his new life, which includes a divorce and moving into his brother’s house, the reader has the feeling that life is happening to him instead of the other way around. I at least was anxious throughout the first half of the book because it felt as though anything could—and would—happen to him, and he would be lucky to survive until the end of the novel. But survive he does, and in the process of blundering through everything, he heals himself from his traumatic childhood and helps his niece and nephew to heal from their trauma as well.
A.M. Homes is a prolific writer known for novels and short stories that feature extreme situations and characters, oftentimes controversial in nature. May We Be Forgiven is certainly not the exception, as it touches on extramarital affairs, racism, and the dark, innermost thoughts that most of us have but don’t want to admit to. Born in D.C. and given up for adoption, Homes received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
She wrote her first novel at age 19, which was published nearly 10 years later, and after meeting her birth parents wrote a memoir (The Mistress’s Daughter) about the experience. As well as short stories and novels, she wrote for the second season of The L Word, and produced the third season. She also developed the HBO series The Hamptons. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, McSweeney’s, and The New Yorker, among others. In addition to winning the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2013, she has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Cullman Center Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Foundation for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives in New York City with her daughter, where she teaches creative writing at Princeton.