In a profile in the Telegraph, A.M. Homes outs herself as a Girl Scout leader, which is kinda hilarious given that her book The End of Alice was banned all over the place for its depiction of a friendship between a teenager and a pedophile.

I thought her new book was great, and relatively optimistic, given her past body of work. The interview shed some light on where that optimism might've come from:

The other big event that changed the course of her fiction was becoming a mother. Her daughter, Juliet, is now nine. 'Having a child and a family, I not only feel obligated to be hopeful, but I want to be hopeful,’ she says. 'I want to push back against the pessimism. I can’t bear to accept that everything is basically going to shit. And everything is: the economy, the family, the social structures, the class divide, the political process in this country, global warming, random violence from terrorism. Unless you want to live in denial, I feel that you have to train yourself to find hope. The logical response is to get incredibly depressed, but what’s the point of that? Especially if you’ve got children.’

Read the whole interview.