crooked house

Are You My Mother? Maud Interviews Alison Bechdel

Can't wait to get my hands on a copy of Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir (is that a thing?) about her relationship with her mother. Maud Newton talks to her about it in this really intriguing interview.

AB: One of my earliest, most powerful memories of my mother is playing this game where I would be a crippled child like the kids I would see at the orthopedic wing of the hospital when I would go to get my fallen arches checked up on. I was just fascinated with these children, with their external signs of disability, their crutches and braces and big shoes. There was something about that that I needed to reenact, and my mother entered into that imaginary space so willingly with me and in such an encouraging way. Even though I knew there was something weird about having this fantasy about disabled children, she didn't sensor it. She encouraged me to go with it, and I feel like she probably did that with me in lots of imaginary games as a kid but for some reason this is the one that I remember the most vividly. And I speculate in the book that it's because it was a fantasy that she shared to a certain extent as well.

 

BNR: And when your OCD was making it really difficult to keep the diary, your mom would write down your entries. I remember that from Fun Home, too, and both times it gave me chills. The devotion implicit in it.

 

AB: Oh my God, that was another pivotal moment. She would sit there and write down everything I said. It was amazing. It also becomes weirdly this template for my relationship later with therapists, other women who would sit there and take down notes on what I was saying.

Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal

Interview with Eleanor Catton from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

I was a little hesitant to read Eleanor Catton's debut novel The Rehearsal -- she was in her very early twenties when she wrote it and the praise on the back of the book seemed as overblown as it usually is for a new writer. (And for old ones, for that matter.) But I cracked the thing open and started in. A character called the saxophone teacher was refusing to take on a new student in dialogue that seemed ludicrously florid. "Let me put it this way," the teacher says, "a film of soured breast milk clutches at your daughter like a shroud." I might have actually rolled my eyes at that point. I told myself to give the thing ten pages.

Five or six pages in, I was hooked. This is a brilliant and unusual book, written in an experimental style and peopled with characters that actually have depth and layers. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that the book is about performance  -- students at a drama school put on a play about a recent sex abuse scandal at a neighbouring school for girls, which perfectly allows for an exploration of how adolescents begin to consciously shape, or perform, their personalities. In the video I've posted above, the very young Eleanor Catton talks about how the novel came about.

Although I cannot find it anywhere -- perhaps it was just for a blurb? -- apparently Joshua Ferris wrote somewhere that the book is "as if Miss Jean Brodie got lost in Barth's funhouse." If you are the kind of person that description appeals to, you will love this book. If you are the kind of person that description would turn off, there's still a good chance you will love this book.

Children in Fiction with Pasha Malla, Over At Maud's

Pasha Malla's terrific book of short stories, The Withdrawal Method -- a debut that got a lot of positive attention here in Canada, including a nomination for the Giller Prize, which is very fancy --is now available in the United States. To mark this occasion, we decided to have a little conversation about children in fiction. I was particularly interested in Pasha's fictional kids but Pasha, in typical Pasha fashion, was more interested in other people's. You can read the conversation over at Maud's, who was kind enough to post it for us. (By the way, it's Maud's birthday today! Send her some good wishes... I'd have the baby today, if I could be assured she wouldn't be undercooked, just so she'd share Maud's astrological profile.)

Interview with Sara O'Leary, author of When You Were Small

Sara O'Leary, author of the award-winning  picture book When You Were Small .

STEPH: Can you tell me a little bit about your background as a writer? From Google I know (or I think I know) that you:

1)  are currently teaching Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal
2) have an MFA from the University of British Columbia
3) were the books columnist for The Vancouver Sun and on Freestyle, a CBC Radio One show
4) are widely published here in Canada as a literary journalist
5) have published at least two works of  fiction for adults
6) have won awards for your playwrighting
7) have already written the sequel to When You Were Small
8) have written a YA novel with your oldest son

Is it fair to ask what kind of writing you prefer? Did you always want to write for children or did the desire come out of having children of your own?

SARA: I've been writing since I was young (she says, realising that she no longer is).  Studied poetry as a teenager with people like Patrick Lane  and Lorna Crozier , then fell into fiction and had a dalliance with postcard stories, followed by flirtations with playwriting and screenwriting.  Once I had children of my own it seemed a logical progression to start writing children's stories.  I'm still writing fiction but I'm also doing more writing for children – including writing a YA novel with my son Liam.  It's called Malone Alone and is about a boy whose parents take him from Vancouver to a little village on the Bay of Fundy.  Which is exactly what happened to Liam.  Only in the novel, the boy's parents are sucked into a time portal and vanish. Which didn't actually happen to us when we moved to St. Martin's although we did feel like we'd travelled back in time when we were told there was no high speed internet in the village.

As far as what genre I prefer, I'd probably be better off if I did have stronger tendencies in one direction.  I often feel that rather than being like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the mountain, I am frantically trying to keep a number of smaller rocks rolling in unison. I love fiction, all forms of fiction.  Writing the novel with my son has been great fun, but now that it's done I'm going back to a collection of short stories I have underway.

STEPH:  Have you always wanted to be a writer?

SARA: Except for the times when I desperately wished to be almost anything else.

STEPH: How is writing fiction for adults different from writing it for children?

SARA: I think the main difference is in the perception, actually.  People seem to think that writing for children is much, much easier than writing for adults.  Which it is not.  And I have a pet peeve about bad writing being passed off as appropriate for YA novels.   Like they aren't going to be able to tell the difference.

STEPH:  I read in one of your reviews (of the Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books) that when you were reading the Nancy Drew books as  a child, you wanted to be Nancy Drew. And that, at a certain point, reading about Mma Ramotswe as an adult, you felt the same way. I love that. What were some of your favourite books as a child? What are some of your favourite books for children now? And what are some of your favourites for adults?

SARA: That's a huge question and I could go on all day about favourite books for children.  I will say that I've always been a huge fan of Maurice Sendak's books and I think the world would be a much colder place without Max and the Wild Things.  And it's lovely reading books to your own children that you remember having read to you – my mother saved my Alice and my Mother Goose and other things which has been lovely.  And I can still read Dr. Seuss with my eyes shut.

New books: I love anything Oliver Jeffers  does does and we're besotted with Ian Falconer's Olivia books - I sort of want to be Olivia these days. We're also big fans of the series of books by Robin Mitchell and Judith Steed that my publisher did.  They are about these little doll characters named Sunny and Windy. There are others too but I have a hard time remembering which ones are theirs and which ones my son made up.   I think Rainy is the one that he made from a clothes pin and some felt and then made his own book.  Which leads me to Euan O'Leary – another of my favourite authors.

For older kids, I loved the Lemony Snicket books and for anybody else who did I would also recommend Philip Ardagh, a British author with a fantastic sense of humour.  The Fall of Fergal is one of his. Philip Pullman, Eoin Colfer, and Marcus Sedgwick are all good. I seem to be reading more boy books because of what comes into the house.There are some very scary books by a fellow named Joseph Delaney which we liked.  Also an Englishwoman named Michelle Paver I interviewed last year who has done a series of novels called Wolf Brother.My son is addicted to the Ian MacKellan cd versions of the books.  Susan Juby, whose Alice books I love, has a new book out called Another Kind of Cowboy which is very, very good.   I have just read a book called Very Serious Children  by my friend Caroline Adderson and it was very funny – about two little boys with circus clowns for parents who try to run away to small-town Saskatchewan to have a normal life where they can do things like eat vegetables.

Adult books, hmm.  I just read a fantastic new book called The Outlander by Gil Adamson.  Published by Anansi and it was the first thing I'd read in ages that really felt fresh to me.  Also just read the new A.L. Kennedy novel, Day, and … well, would have to go look under my bed to tell you what else.  I want to read that Margaret Wise Brown bio that you've been talking about – maybe I can find something to offer in trade.  I miss writing a weekly column because for years I had a steady influx of new books.  I got kind of spoilt.

STEPH:  I read that you got the idea for When You Were Small from a family joke. Can you tell me about that?