Write Call

I began writing a novel eight years ago following the death of my mother. She was ninety-four and had been living in a seniors’ residence in Collingwood, Ontario, near where I live. My sister and I were doing our best to keep her out of long-term care with the help of the province’s home care service and an array of personal support workers from private agencies. Mum had recently had a mild stroke that affected her right side, and she was suffering from dementia. Even worse was a basal cell carcinoma on her face that, despite several major surgeries over the years, was now spreading at an alarming rate. Her doctor persuaded us to take her back to her surgeon at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto for an assessment, which we did.

The news was terrible. A CAT scan showed the hideously disfiguring cancer had gone under the skin and into the bone. Surgery was out of the question. She was already refusing food, presumably because of the pain, although characteristically she did not complain. The surgeon told us that soon she would be unable to eat. We had no idea how much longer she could go on this way. Her own mother had lived to ninety-nine, and despite everything our mother, although frail, was in relatively good health, completely mobile, and insisting on going to the dining room for the meals she couldn’t enjoy. The future, maybe years of it, was too terrible to contemplate. MAID was not an option because she was not competent to consent. Her surgeon advised that she undergo three doses of “palliative radiation,” two weeks apart. We stopped after the second treatment because the burns from the radiation were making her pain much worse. About two weeks later, she got out of bed in the middle of the night, fell, and hit her head. The coroner said she never regained consciousness. Surely it was a blessing.

Writers are always on the lookout for stories, and we can be ruthless in what we decide to exploit. On one of those three-hour trips to Sunnybrook, with Mum sleeping in the back seat, I mused to my sister about a possible novel: about two sisters caring for a dying mother who is in so much pain that they contrive to end her misery themselves, and then they have to hide the crime from their other siblings. Macabre, I know, but the situation was beyond desperate. We imagined it as a darkly funny psychological thriller.

Around the same time, I had dinner with an old friend who told me an incredible story. Her aging mother had just found out that her cherished younger brother, a former teacher, had been charged with and convicted of a statutory rape that had occurred decades earlier, and now, as an elderly man, he was going to prison. The family was turned inside out. I tried to imagine the seismic effect something like this would have on a family, how it would rock their world, and I knew there was a novel in there too.

Another genesis of my novel was the difficulties I was then having in my relationships with my siblings — my younger brother and three younger sisters. Looking back, I can see that our mother’s death disrupted the somewhat uneasy connections we had established over the years in order to keep the peace. In my experience, large families are an ongoing system of shifting alliances with people who have been thrown together by chance. Major events like death or divorce or — in a family of writers such as we are — publishing a book can easily strain these often tenuous bonds. Step out of your lane and you will be put in your place.

In any case, after our mother died, I was dismayed and bewildered by the power of my negative emotion toward my brother and sisters. It seemed to be a reaction that “too far exceeds its cause,” to quote Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Map.” So much so that I went into therapy to try to gain some understanding of why I felt not just beset by envy and animosity but actually threatened by these strangers with whom I had grown up. My therapist thought it might be a useful exercise to write something from my siblings’ points of view: in other words, to imagine what it might be like to be them, to apply the empathy that is a central fact of fiction to my own situation.

All of these things were swirling around in my head as I sat at my keyboard: my mother’s terrible last days; the explosive effect on families of buried sins and secrets; the burden of my own past trauma, which I have previously described in these pages; and the confusing atavism of a family unit as its members grow older. I had no real sense of where this tangle would take me; it seemed too jumbled to ever cohere into one book. But I had decided on a very tight structure: a novel that would take place over three or four days and would be told in layers from each of the four sisters’ points of view. The title I chose for it, “Orchard Park,” is the fictional name of the fictional childhood home of fictional sisters who come together there for a few days in the spring of 2019, ostensibly to honour their late mother and try to understand the estrangement of their only brother.

For most of us who have managed it, writing a novel is a messy business. “Orchard Park” went through many drafts, at least five over four years, before I showed it to my agent. She liked it very much and asked the editor of my previous novel to read it. In the end, that publisher declined because, as I have also written in these pages, it had lost money on the earlier book. I discovered what legions of authors already know: that success can be fleeting and that luck, timing, connections, and plain old serendipity have as much sway as talent and perseverance in this business. Of course, all the time I was working on it, a little voice in my head was asking the obvious question: What are your siblings going to think about this, a novel concerning four sisters and an absent brother?

Call it magical thinking or wishful thinking, denial, or simply writerly hubris, but I managed to convince myself that it would be all right, because I’d created a work of fiction. The events, the plot, the setting, and, yes, the characters are made up. All of it — made up the way novels are, from a collage of people and places and feelings an author has known or heard about or simply imagined. It will be all right. That is what I said to the cautionary voice in my head during the four years I was writing. It will be all right. They will understand. I deserve this. That is what I told myself as I sent the manuscript to my agent and then to my editor. It will be all right.

Joan Didion once observed that writing is a hostile act. She meant that writers are by nature trying to impose their idea, their picture onto the reader. “It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way,” she said in The Paris Review. “Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.”

Didion’s point seems especially true when the readers are family members. Although siblings share many experiences and influences, their respective truths are wildly various. With “Orchard Park,” I was exploring my own “truth” and by extension imposing it on them, although I did not see it that way at the time. I even convinced myself that the novel would give my family a chance to heal, to see the truth the way I saw it.

But then it ceased to matter. After my publisher rejected the manuscript, several others did too. As disappointing as this was, part of me was relieved that I would not have to face my siblings over it after all. Despite my ambivalence, I continued sending the work out, without my agent’s help, to small presses, still hoping against hope I would find it a home. I both desperately wanted to see it in print and shuddered at the prospect. After a couple of years and many more rejections, I eventually gave up and consigned the project to my personal slush pile. It wasn’t my first unpublished novel. Now that I am in my seventies, though, it may very well be my last.

Then, a year ago, the long-hoped-for and yet simultaneously dreaded email arrived. A small press based in Saskatchewan to which I had submitted the manuscript more than twelve months earlier wanted to publish my book this spring. I was beyond excited, and my excitement effectively muted the cautionary voices. This was karma. Someone wanted my novel; I was a real writer after all. I was going to do this. Nothing was going to stop me, certainly not the feeble nagging in my head. Weeks later, I signed a contract and braced myself for the pre-publication flurry of activity that is one of the best parts of being an author.

The doubts persisted. It’s no accident that on a recent internet ramble, I came upon a 2009 Guardian article by Lionel Shriver with the headline “I Sold My Family for a Novel.” In her typical pull-no-punches style, Shriver recounted the effects of the publication of A Perfectly Good Family, with characters she based on her still-living parents and her two brothers. Like me, she assumed her relatives would have a sense of humour about her fictionalized depictions of them, and if they were upset about any of it, they would get over it. She told herself that “kidnapping of kin” for her art was part of the job. “I convinced myself that by changing the careers and numerous other biographical details of the characters, as well as by conceiving a whole plot that bore no resemblance whatsoever to real events, I had sufficiently fictionalised the source principals in my drama,” she explained. “This was a story about three siblings in their 30s squabbling over who inherits a magnificent if crumbling house in which I was never raised.”

The similarities with my own circumstances almost made me choke. My novel is also, as Shriver described hers, a story about siblings “squabbling over who inherits a magnificent if crumbling house in which I was never raised.” The voices grew louder.

Shriver paid dearly for her hubris or magical thinking or whatever you want to call it. Her cherished younger brother didn’t speak to her for two years. Her parents were “incandescent” and went so far as to threaten to sue her publisher for defamation. Her relationship with them was never mended. Even as she was writing the novel, she knew she was “venturing into perilous territory.” Yet she persisted. Because even if you’re Lionel Shriver, writing a novel is really hard, and eventually the thing takes on a life of its own and will not be silenced. Her advice to others based on her experience? “Anyone considering writing fiction or a memoir that brushes even slightly against real-life family should take heed: think twice.”

And so, as the summer wore on and I anticipated a fall spent working with an editor and approving cover designs and talking up my novel on social media, I once again began to have second thoughts. I, of all people, shouldn’t have needed Shriver’s advice. Four years ago, my daughter published a memoir (a misery memoir) about her relationship with me. The fallout from that book has been catastrophic to everyone concerned. My relationship with her has not recovered, and I fear it never will. My daughter’s relationship to other family members, who stood by me through all of it, is fractured. The loss to all of us has been incalculable and tragic. Heartbreaking. Yet there I was, convincing myself that it would be all right, that my brother and sisters would get over it, that I somehow deserved to see my truths in print. Magical thinking indeed.

As the summer dwindled into fall, the voices grew even louder. In the end, I lost my nerve. I sent “Orchard Park” to each of my siblings and asked them to read it. Some delusional part of me hoped they might judge it on its merits. But their collective response was a resounding thumbs-down and a caution that publication would “cause serious and irreversible problems with our relationship.” I wasn’t surprised. And so I cancelled my contract with the small press in Regina. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

In one of my social media profiles, I describe myself as a “failed writer.” It was supposed to be sort of a joke. But now I can’t help feeling I’ve failed on all fronts. We writers are a solipsistic lot. I console myself with the knowledge that I did the right thing. It matters immensely that someone out there wanted to publish my novel, but still, my heart is broken.