Tag Archives: post-fiction

Laugh Track at the Beauty School

Posted on by

This is not a picture of my four sisters and me; neither is my next novel.

I am one of five sisters. I was born first and in exchange for having the best memories of our parents when they were young and cool, I missed out on adventures my sisters had together after I swore off women for a life with my husband and sons. Different combinations of my sisters have traveled to Disneyland, New York City, Winnipeg, Amsterdam, the Northwest Territories, and the old gravel pit in Prince George all without me.

This year, for the first time, I made it to one of their “girls’ trips.” I met the three of my sisters who aren’t currently breastfeeding (see, someone’s always left out – it’s not personal) in Calgary to spend a weekend together.

I am terrible at ordering and it was over a bowl of thick green sauce at dinner that I taught the girls a new word: sistering. It’s like mothering only just between us. And then I warned them about my second novel. It’s about a group of five sisters.

No, it’s not about us.

If it’s not a tribute to our family why stretch the cast over five main characters? Well, because it’s not a stretch. There were five Spice Girls, five Go-Gos, five Miss Bennetts in Pride and Prejudice, and, of course, five Dionne quintuplets. My mind isn’t the only place where a group of five girls is the only size that makes sense.

It was impossible to write the book-sisters without invoking bits of my real sisters. I used some of our quirks and experiences as inspiration, like any writer would have done. To add to the tangle, our family is large. On my side alone there are seven siblings, seven spouses, one ex-spouse, and twenty-two nieces and nephews. It’s hard to create characters and situations that don’t overlap in some way with people I know very well simply because I know so many people so very well. When we’re primed to look, even general coincidences can seem like deliberate rip-offs. For instance, one of the sisters is the book is a nurse, just like Amy. One is divorced, like Sara. One is married to a man who’s adopted, like Mary’s husband. These elements aren’t uncommon inside or outside literature. Moreover, my book’s story wouldn’t work without them. And the story definitely wouldn’t work without the intimate understanding of sisterhood we sisters have given each other.

None of this is the same thing as writing a story about my sisters.

Still, I submitted to the girls teasing me about the book for the rest of the weekend. They let me have it, with that sharp sweetness of theirs and lots of laughter.

The next day Amy had planned girlie activities for us. We spent the morning shopping. That was easy. The afternoon was more difficult. The other girls wanted to go to a spa together. The only place that could book all four of us at the same time was not exactly a spa but a beauty school. I don’t want to use its real name so let’s just call it – oh, I don’t know – Carvel Mollege.

I’d had a facial only once before. It seemed like witchcraft – a superstitious ritual in smearing stuff on my face and wiping it off, a cycle of application and removal. The key to a successful facial is to end it immediately after finishing a thorough removal.

I was about to learn this.

If I’d been a more experienced exploiter of the pink ghetto that is esthetics, I would have realized how strangely my facial was unfolding and made some kind of protest. As it was I laid under a towel that smelled like someone else while a college girl let facial goops drip into my hairline, while she failed to rinse the cocktail of creams and toners and tonics off my skin.

At some arbitrarily determined point she said we were done. My skin felt tight and tacky as I stood up and looked for a mirror. There was only one in the room, mounted too high for me to see much of my face in it. All I could see was a dark, oily perimeter where my hair had soaked up the skin treatments.

Not a good sign.

The supervising instructor was waved out of a classroom to inspect my student’s work. “How do you feel?” she asked me.

“Pretty sticky.”

“From the moisturizer,” she finished for me.

I went downstairs, fingering the gummy surface of my face. In the lobby, my three little sisters were sitting in a love seat meant for two. They looked great. But when they saw me, they looked concerned – and amused. That’s when I knew for sure something wasn’t right. While the receptionist ran my card through the machine, I flexed my sticky face until it cracked. I stood in the lobby and peeled a sheet of – something – off my face.

Across the room, my sisters were cackling. “Why’d it have to be Jenny?”

Between my fingers I held a transparent mask of most of my face. It reminded me of a bored habit I had in grade four, pouring white glue into my hand and letting it dry before trying to peel it off in one piece. This glue mask was a good one. Every hair of my left eyebrow was perfectly visible.

I rolled the film into a ball between my fingers. “I’m not paying for this.”

My sisters kept laughing.

“I understand they’re just students,” I told the receptionist. “But look at my sisters: they’re not down here peeling their faces off.”

No one argued about refunding my money. Maybe they should have. My sisters and I had spun the barrel in a game of college student esthetician roulette and on our fourth shot, my shot, the game fired its inevitable concluding round.

We got in my minivan and drove away, off to a dinner where I would order another plate of food I wouldn’t like. Mary told me how radiant I looked. Amy lent me some makeup. And we never stopped laughing. That’s my sisters: the laugh track of my life, calming me down, cheering me up, convincing me this drama is much more fun than any amount of reason says it should be.

When my new book appears next year (please read it) don’t skip the dedication page. But just in case, let me reveal now how it will read:

For Amy, Sara, Mary, and Emily

All of whom inspired, none of whom is depicted in this book

Nothing Comes from Nothing: Reading Eric Freeze’s “Dominant Traits”

Posted on by

Dominant Traits, by fellow “Ridgeview” High School Alumnus, Eric Freeze

I never read faster than when I’ve found a short book written by someone I know.  It’s especially true when that short book by someone I know is also a good book.

That’s the experience I had blazing through Dominant Traits, a collection of short stories by Eric Freeze.  Eric and I went to the same high school – the one I came to in grade eleven and into which I never became fully socially integrated.  He was in the show-choir/theatre scene and I was an egghead poor-girl whose only extra-curricular pursuit was a part-time job.  We were not close.  But in a small school where everyone had some knowledge and experience with each other, Eric and I had good will between us.

This good will, our high school, writing fiction, and seeing it published aren’t the only things Eric and I share.  We have both set stories in the same southern Alberta town where we went to school, the place that inspires his “Ridgeview.”  We both write fiction deeply rooted in real life.  I read his collected stories out of sequence and noticed real life first in “A Prayer for the Cosmos” when the narrator refers to an infamous pep rally where dear old Ridgeview High School made a casual racial slur against an exchange student basketball star playing for a rival school.  Something like that really happened.

Then there was the story about the awkward white rural kid who thought of himself as a rapper.  When I first came to Ridgeview, I assumed this kid must have been playing a character, trying to be funny.  He wasn’t.  It was excruciatingly embarrassing.  I tried to ignore him.  I guess it worked.  I hadn’t thought about him for decades.  He’s probably grown up and put his rapper days behind him.  But then, in Eric’s “Francis the Giant” story, there he is again, not grown up at all, falling down on-stage in this MC Hammer act, and I can’t look away from him.  Eric’s fiction folded the kid’s story into the accordion fan I hadn’t realized it had always been for me.  There was the real kid, his act, my initial confusion about the act, the fictional character arising from the kid, and then the hallucinated transformation the character makes within the story, changing from a scrawny teenager to a giant, leech-flinging monster.  We are everyone around us.  We’re folded into accordion fans with everyone we know.  Their stories are rightfully ours, the opposite sides of our own folded surfaces.

“He’s doing it,” I thought as Eric’s stories started to bend into my own experiences.

I do it too.  Last night, at a literary event in Edmonton, I read one of the chapters from my novel that is crafted very much like an event from my family’s real story.  Afterwards, as I signed her book, a nice lady asked if the book was fiction or not.  I grinned, “Yeah, it’s fiction.  But it cheats.”  She seemed pleased.  Readers love cheating.

Though I’ve been on the giving end – force-feeding my family, friends, and high school classmates doses of our histories, fictionalized, printed, bound between the brittle, narrow margins of my perspective — I don’t think I’d ever been on the receiving end of this kind of storytelling in so direct a way until I read Eric’s book.  Seeing it from the other side had a much greater impact on me than I expected.  I didn’t just smirk knowingly and say, “Ah, yes, it’s this.”  Instead, my heart lurched inside me when I realized Eric’s “Torched” – a piece about a roofing crew grappling with the tenuous mortality of men early in adulthood — includes the story of a boy from our school who suffered an oddball head injury riding a bike in the dark.  Even though he seemed to recover from the accident, he suddenly died from the injury a few years later.  It’s weird but true.  There’s a monument to it in Eric’s book.

It was good for me to read Dominant Traits.  It ambushed me even after a mutual friend, the eye on the cover, and my cursory grasp of ancient Ridgeview gossip warned me the book was closely connected to things I had seen and heard for myself.  Reading it helped me consider my own writing in a new way, with greater empathy, with more tenderness and patience for what I demand of everyone.

Here was another writer not only playing my game but playing much of it on the same field – the same place and time.  Sure, his “Ridgeview” is different from mine.  He lived there as an insider (compared to me, anyways) and as a boy.  Unlike Eric, I would probably never attempt a story about cattle castration.  That is not my Ridgeview.  But I knew the convenience store, the comically wide roads, even the squeak of the gym floor, though I usually only heard it through closed doors.

Closed doors – that brings me to the point where I prove I don’t give old high school classmates free passes in book reviews.  The collection, in many ways, is men’s fiction — if the prevailing literary privilege will allow me to talk of such a thing.  It’s smitten with the male problem of imagining erections and ejaculations are far more salient in the world outside their own pants than they actually are.  The other half of humanity rolls its eyes, scoots to the cold side of the bed, and tells those Very Important erections to just go to sleep, for crying out loud.  I’d like to see a man my age write a meaningful, earnest, literary love story without any penises in it.  I’m not protesting out of stodginess.  I’m protesting because I’m tired and disappointed with male (and often female) writers taking the slimy, easy shortcut to writing about intimacy.  Work at sex and intimacy in a different medium once in a while, fellas.  Feel free to prove me wrong with examples in the comments.

In the age of “post-fiction,” writing from life is accepted and understood, sometimes preferred.  Maybe it’s not considered cheating anymore.  I don’t believe in creation ex nihilo – that everything we know must have been created by some kind of magic out of emptiness.  I don’t believe in it physically or artistically.  Ex nihilo nihil fit.  I’d wager Eric Freeze doesn’t believe in it either.  Everything created is organized out of pieces of things that are here already – Big Bangs exploding whenever someone or something comes crashing through us.

It’s Not You, It’s Me – The Post-Fiction Movement and My Novel

Posted on by
A gravestone of a real great-great aunt at the real Butcher Hill Cemetery

A gravestone of a real great-great aunt at the real Butcher Hill Cemetery

There were cupcakes, pink tissue paper flowers bigger than my head, cupcakes, a sunny backyard full of people I love, and cupcakes. It was a family party – a birthday bash for one of my nieces.

Eventually, the conversation turned to the book I wrote that had been published exactly one week earlier.  My sister-in-law, who hadn’t read a word of the novel yet, was not quite kidding when she asked me, “So, which character am I?”

I could answer with confidence.  “None of them.  None of the characters in the book is anyone here.”  I glanced around the yard to make sure it was true.  It was.  None of the real people at this particular gathering cast any shadow on my fiction (except, I recall on rereading this, a few of my little sons).

“Doesn’t matter.  When I’m reading it I’ll think one of them’s me anyway,” my sister-in-law warned, because she’s funny and she’s self-aware enough to know how hard it is not to see ourselves in everything.

The conversation jostled my latent social science senses awake.  What would I find if I did a good old “content analysis” of my novel, chapter by chapter, looking for traces of real life?

Here’s what I found.  The chapters of my book roughly fell into three categories of reality/unreality:

  1. Chapters almost completely ripped from real life:   7 out of 23

This proportion is smaller than I feared.  These are the chapters where a few identifying features are changed, the sequence of events is streamlined, but most of the action and reaction unfold almost exactly like events from my personal and family histories.

2.  Chapters I Made Up Almost Completely — Almost:  6 out of 23

Hey, there’s real fiction in here!  What a relief!  I was gratified when my mum’s BFF wanted to know who in our real lives a certain character from the book was and I could answer with a resounding, “He’s no one!  I made him up!”

3.  Chapters Made from Conglomerations of Fictional and Real Elements: 10 out of 23

Not surprisingly, this mixed category is the largest one.  What’s odd about these chapters is that it’s the reality in them that strains the hardest against plausibility.  If a reader ever looks up from the book and says, “Nah, I can’t buy that” he’s probably rejecting something I lifted from real life and then toned down with fiction to make it less jarring.  An old lady who sleeps on a saw bench?  No way.  A cemetery called Butcher Hill?  That’s too much.  An exhumation? Get right out, that never really happens.  It does.  It did.  As they say, I can’t make this stuff up.  Maybe I don’t have the guts.

Since before I was born, it’s been a Beatles cliché that it’s hard for artists to come up with anything new.  The world is old and full of people and stories.  Part of the art-imitates-life problem is genuinely accidental, especially for people from large families like mine. The more people a writer knows with the intimacy of family, the more difficult it is for her to avoid treading on real life situations in her work.

For instance, I have an unpublished novel currently circulating with my agent about a group of five sisters.  Not coincidentally, I am one of five sisters.  When it came to writing sisterhood, a group of five was the size that made the most sense to me.  I make no apologies for that.  However, I started to squirm when I saw that, in order to advance the plot, I needed one of the sisters to have a professional medical background.  Fine.  But in my real sister-group, one of us works as a nursing instructor.  Medicine is full of women and this alone could be dismissed as chance.  But then the story needed one of the sisters to have a husband who’s adopted.  One of my brothers-in-law fits this description.  Another sister in the novel needed access to the justice system.  That’s me.  And the plot was going nowhere without a sister with lots of money – enter another fact from one of my sisters’ lives.  I finished the novel, looked at all the parallels, and wondered what really happened.  Did the plot arise first and demand all these real life details or did real life tumble around in my imagination until it formed into the plot?  And was the same kind of thing happening in my published novel?

There’s a literary movement hatching out of this chicken-and-egg fiction conundrum.  It questions whether recounting real life is actually a problem.  It’s been called “post-fiction” and refers to writing that obscures boundaries between fiction and fact.  As critic Michael H. Miller of New York Observer explains,

This writing represents a chiasmus between the real and the made-up, blurring the two into nonrecognition, confronting the reader with all those issues one is trained by the Western academy not to look for: namely, the author herself, hiding behind the words.

Recently, there’s been a spell of writers – like Sheila Heti and Tao Lin – producing novels with real people from their lives cast as characters.  Those real people include themselves.  Sometimes, not even the names are changed.  These narratives have been called tedious by some critics.  They state the obvious, deal in the mundane, they can be repetitive.  Some readers dislike them.  Some think they’re brilliant.

Whatever they are, they make me feel a little more confident in my own post-fiction inclinations.  I’m so comfortable with it I’ve made this digital “scrapbook” where I collect images, quotations, and music that inspired or emulate my book.  In true post-fiction style, I borrowed the idea from fellow writer, Rebecca Campbell.  You can see it here:

http://lovelettersoftheangelsofdeath.tumblr.com/

Readers might be getting used to seeing the author standing in front of the lens, in the foreground.  Maybe I’m cheating them if they don’t see me.  And I’m hard not to recognize.  Like me, the main female character in my novel is a mother of a group of sons, raising them under the influence of her solid marriage and her rather jaunty death fixation.  She goes where I’ve gone and seen much of what I’ve seen.  We have matching root canals in one of our teeth.  We both said the same thing to our husbands when we saw they’d cut their throats shaving the morning before we married them.  But even after all this, she is not really me.  The very act of creating her made her different from me.  She’s a story I tell.

And in the same way, regardless of any likenesses, I promise, none of the characters in my book is you.