She received her B.A. in 1985 from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied with the author Grace Paley. She earned her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Homes currently lives in New York City with her young daughter. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia University, The New School, and New York University.

In April 2007, she stated in the Washington Post, “I've dated men and I've dated women and there's no more or less to it than that.” A.M. Homes - Author Interviews In an interview with Diva magazine she said, "‘I am bisexual, but I wouldn’t necessarily define myself that way."

Homes is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, National Foundation for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, and the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis. Her work has been translated into 18 languages.

Fiction

Homes' first novel, Jack, an exploration of family life and sexuality, was published to critical acclaim in 1989; with a screenplay by the author, it was produced as a film for the cable network Showtime in 2004. She followed it a year later with the short-story collection The Safety of Objects, which was released as a feature film in 2001. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham called her 1996 novel The End of Alice as "dark and treacherous as ice on a highway. It establishes A.M. Homes as one of the bravest, most terrifying writers working today. She never plays it safe, and it begins to look as if she can do almost anything."

Homes's 1999 novel Music for Torching...featuring characters from The Safety of Objects...brought her widest acclaim. Gary Krist in The New York Times wrote, "I found myself rapt from beginning to end, fascinated by Homes's single-minded talent for provocation.". People magazine called the novel "haunting,", Britain's The Observer found it "immensely disturbing". Writing in The Guardian in 2003, the writer Ali Smith called Homes' collection Things You Should Know "funny and glinting and masterful, light as air, strange as a dream, monstrous as truth: the real and classic thing."

Journalism

Her journalism appears in magazines such as The New Yorker,Artforum, Vanity Fair, and McSweeney's, among others. She has also been a contributing editor to "BOMB Magazine" since 1995, where she has written articles, published short stories, and interviewed various artists and writers including Eric Fischl, Tobias Wolff, and Adam Bartos. In 2004, The New Yorker published "The Mistress's Daughter", an essay about Homes's meeting, after 31 years, the biological parents who had put her up for adoption at birth. The essay eventually was expanded and published as a memoir in 2007.

Television

Homes wrote for season two of the television drama series The L Word and produced season three. On July 20, 2007 she announced that she would be developing an HBO series about the Hamptons - "a cross between Desperate Housewives and Grapes of Wrath."

Novels

• Jack (1989)
• In a Country of Mothers (1993)
• The End of Alice (1996)
• an elaboration on the novel The End of Alice (1996)
• Music for Torching (1999)
• This Book Will Save Your Life (2006)

Story collections

• The Safety of Objects (1990)
• Things You Should Know (2002)

Non-fiction

• People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill (2002)
• On the Street 1980-1990 by Amy Arbus, Introduction by Homes
• The Mistress's Daughter (2007)