Homes, who was adopted at birth, met her biological parents for the first time when she was 31, and published a memoir, The Mistress's Daughter (2007) about her exploration of her expanded "family".

[3] Homes received her Bachelor of Arts in 1985 from Sarah Lawrence College,[4] where she studied with the author Grace Paley.

[5] Homes has written both short stories and novels; the former published in leading magazines such as Granta, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and BOMB.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham described this work as "dark and treacherous as ice on a highway.

"[citation needed]It aroused considerable controversy and received mixed reviews because of its subject matter and objectionable protagonists; in the UK, bookseller W.H.

Jill Adams in The Barcelona Review described it as having Homes' "trademark style of wry humor applied to the uncanny dissection of suburbia’s facade.

"[7]He concluded with a caveat: "In her last two novels, the desire to outrage is so conspicuous that it risks obscuring her powerful gifts as a novelist.

"[7] Her novel, This Book Will Save Your Life (2006), was set in Los Angeles; it satirized upper-class residents and the city's culture.

"[10] The Guardian said that "it was kitschy and bordered on the inane, but there was something appealing about its mixture of the apocalyptic and the perkily upbeat, caught nicely by John Waters when he said: 'If Oprah went insane, this might be her favourite book.

Writing in The Los Angeles Times, Amy Hempel wrote: "Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting the details right.

She has also been a contributing editor to BOMB since 1995, where she has published articles and interviews with various artists and writers, including Eric Fischl, Tobias Wolff, and Adam Bartos.

[16] In 2004, The New Yorker published "The Mistress's Daughter", her essay about meeting her biological parents for the first time at age 31; unmarried when she was born, they had immediately surrendered her for adoption.

She developed an HBO series, The Hamptons about the resort towns along the ocean on eastern Long Island, which she described as "a cross between Desperate Housewives and Grapes of Wrath.

Her birth mother Ellen Ballman was having an affair with her much older, married boss Norman Hecht when she became pregnant.

Yaddo gives artists the increasingly rare gift of a time and place to do one's work, suspended from the intrusive buzz of the every day.