My vision blurs with unshed tears. Abel we could have scattered anywhere. So why don’t I just scatter
her
anywhere?
I can’t. Somehow I can’t.
Back at my house the door is open. I forgot to lock it. I go into the living room and push aside the things on my mantelpiece—books, a stone Buddha, the meteorite—and set
the urn in the middle. It really is lovely; she probably picked it out herself. Of course she picked it out. She wouldn’t have risked the chance of being put in anything vulgar.
And she wouldn’t have wanted to be on a mantelpiece, either. Out in public.
I pick the urn up again and go out to the sun porch and put it on a shelf between some vases and clay pots. There, that’s better. Whenever I’m out here—watching the sun go down, looking at my roses—I’ll see it, I’ll think,“My mother.” I won’t forget her, that’s for sure.
Not that I would have anyway. Not that we forget.
For their generous counsel I am indebted to:
The experts—Dr. Rick Davis in Guelph, Dr. Donner Dewdney in Des Moines and Dennis James at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto;
The friends and family—Christopher Dewdney, Beth Kirkwood, Marni Jackson, Anne Mackenzie and Brian Fawcett;
The agents—Jackie Kaiser and Nicole Winstanley;
The editors—Iris Tupholme at HarperCollins Canada, who is my support, and Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan Books in New York, who is my beacon.
An Interview with Barbara Gowdy
13 An Excerpt from Barbara Gowdy’s
Helpless
Visit the author online at
www.barbaragowdy.ca
Gowdy speculates that if she had succumbed to kids and domesticity, she would have produced maybe three books instead of the six works of fiction,”
“Gowdy, who became a writer by default at age thirty-nine, after trying to be an actress, a broker, a secretary and an editor, really wanted to be a pianist like Abel.”
B
ARBARA
G
OWDY
was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.
Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.
Barbara Gowdy
S1GRID ESTRADA.
Her first book,
Through the Green Valley
(a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published
Falling Angels
to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection,
We So Seldom Look on Love,
was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into
Kissed,
a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich.
Falling Angels
was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.
Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—
Mister Sandman
(1995),
The White Bone
(1998) and
The Romantic
(2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including
Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English
and the
Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.
Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each
for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
The Romantic
earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in
Harper’s Magazine,
singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”
Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel,
Helpless,
will be published by HarperCollins in 2007.
She lives in Toronto.
Barbara Gowdy received the prestigious
Marian Engel Award in 1996, recognizing her
contribution to Canadian literature.
We So Seldom Look on Love
Finalist for the Trillium Award
Mister Sandman
Finalist for the Trillium Award
Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Giller Prize
Named a
Times Literary Supplement
“Book of the Year”
The White Bone
Finalist for the Trillium Award
Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Giller Prize
Finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
The Romantic
Nominated for the Man Booker Prize
Finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
Finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’
Prize for Best Book
Finalist for the Trillium Award
“I don’t know how “I could get ideas … if I had the distraction of people in the house.”
“Gowdy’s peripatetic career path echoes Louise’s stumbling attempts to find a fulfilling job in
The Romantic.
”
“When people say reviews and prizes don’t matter, they are wrong.’”
“I always finish a book thinking, ‘That’s it. It’s over. I’m finished. I’m washed up. I have no ideas.’”
“Offering Gowdy gratuitous reassurance is like telling a woman who has already had five healthy babies not to worry during her sixth pregnancy.”
The following interview by Sandra Martin appeared in
The Globe and Mail
just prior to the publication of
The Romantic.
To complete [
The Romantic]
, Barbara Gowdy spent weeks at a time secluded in a hotel room, pushing herself ever further into her work. As Sandra Martin writes, the result is the story of an abandoned little girl desperate to be loved.
Wednesday, January 29,2003
TORONTO—Barbara Gowdy lives in the ideal house for a writer, at the end of a Toronto cul-de-sac backing onto cemetery parkland. It is isolated, slightly sinister because it was built by wife-murderer Peter Demeter, and only large enough to house Gowdy’s boundless imagination and her deeply neurotic grey-and-white cat, Marni.
“When I leave a room, I come back and it is exactly as I have left it,” Gowdy tells me on a cold, sunny morning earlier this month. “I don’t know how I could get ideas or how I would know what I think about anything if I had the distraction of people in the house,” she adds, as I try to imagine the creative licence that comes with that kind of solitude.
And yet what Gowdy visualizes in her seclusion, as she sits at the desk in her third-floor study, or wanders from one obsessively neat room to another, are the lives of lonely young females desperate to form attachments and to find ways of being and belonging in families. ►
“I must tell you that I live in perpetual envy of women with children, no matter how troubled or what they are going through,” she says, as we sit across from each other drinking coffee and nibbling shortbread in her skinny kitchen.
Doe-eyed, with an appealing vulnerability on her heart-shaped face, Gowdy looks at least a decade and a half younger than her fifty-two years. She is wearing black trousers and matching sweater, and nursing her left jaw. An impacted wisdom tooth, which was extracted a few days earlier, has become infected, and Gowdy is downing Tylenol Fours.
Gowdy always imagined she would have children, but she never got pregnant through the course of two failed marriages and untreated endometriosis, and now she is past menopause. “I am not going to have babies now—at least not in a natural way,” she says in the same matter-of-fact manner that she introduces bizarre compulsions in her fiction, such as the necrophiliac in
We So Seldom Look on Love
who achieves orgasm by sitting on the faces of dead men.
“I do not know what it is to love like that,” she continues as I drag my thoughts back from Raelian cloning tales.
Marni leaps up on the table, turns her back on us, and wraps her twitching tail around her haunches in a territorial signal to me, the interloper.
“Some people can’t stand cats on the table,” she confides. “I am pretty clean and fastidious, but I don’t deny her anything.”
If I lived alone, I would let my cat sit on the table too, I realize with a start.
Gowdy speculates that if she had succumbed to kids and domesticity, she would have produced maybe three books instead of the six works of fiction, including
Falling Angels
and
Mister Sandman
, that have earned her international sales and a raft of award nominations.
Although Gowdy’s writing is not explicitly self-referential, she has mined her own past in a series of haunting novels set mainly in the suburban time zone of her own upbringing in Don Mills, Ontario, in the 1950s and 1960s. Even
The White Bone
, her African novel about a family of elephants, is really a quest for home, and a threnody, as Gowdy herself suggests, for the death of her father to cancer in 1996.
Louise, in Gowdy’s new novel,
The Romantic,
is the only child of a germophobic former beauty queen who disappears when Louise is nine, leaving a terse note on the refrigerator saying,“Louise knows how to work the washing machine.” Bereft, the little girl falls in love with Mrs. Richter, a neighbour woman, and dreams of being adopted. Later, she transfers her affections to Mrs. Richter’s son Abel.
Gowdy, who became a writer by default at age thirty-nine, after trying to be an actress, a broker, a secretary and an editor, really wanted to be a pianist like Abel. She came to the piano late, at about twenty-five. Even though she practised eight hours a day—“I think it ruined my first marriage [to her highschool sweetheart],” she confides—she gave it up after six years because “I was going to be a good piano teacher or a bad barroom pianist.” ►
For a perfectionist like Gowdy, that wasn’t good enough.
She would still rather be a musician than a writer, because she thinks it is a purer art form. The arrangement of sounds has no politics and no ethics, she argues, whereas words are so commonplace that they can have a power and a meaning beyond your intentions. Her failure as a pianist has given her the freedom to write fiction, she thinks, because she doesn’t “revere it so much.”
The connection to writing came through editing. She was working three days a week in the late 1970s as a secretary at the startup publishing house, Lester & Orpen—“I was the ampersand,” she jokes.
She began working on manuscripts, but decided she wasn’t a very good editor, because she kept rewriting people’s copy. After inventing a character to liven up a non-fiction book, she quit to write short stories of her own.
Gowdy’s peripatetic career path echoes Louise’s stumbling attempts to find a fulfilling job in
The Romantic.
So does Gowdy’s love affair with a man she calls M., who is a model for Abel Richter, a dreamy and alcoholic musician with whom Louise falls obsessively in love. “He was a handsome, rapturous, beloved, intelligent, sweet, sweet man, and I could never understand why he drank,” she says of M. “I remember saying to him once, ‘If you give it up, I will give up anything.’ And he said, ‘There is nothing in your life that is as important as this is to me.’ “Eventually, he killed himself driving while drunk.
After leaving M., Gowdy married Mark Howell, another “lovely man,” like her first husband. Howell supported her while she wrote her first novel,
Through the Green Valley,
an Edna O’Brien-inspired Irish romance. That marriage broke up in the fall of 1989, just after
Falling Angels
came out to stellar reviews and brisk sales, because Gowdy met poet Christopher Dewdney and “all hell broke loose.”
Looking back at their reckless passion from the calm stability of a relationship that has now lasted thirteen years, an anniversary that she attributes to the fact that the two of them have always lived apart, Gowdy says the romance was “horribly destructive” for their partners. “I can’t believe I was that heartless about the other people involved—my husband and the woman in [Dewdney’s] life—and yet I was just so crazy about him that nothing else existed.”
As we talk, Gowdy continues to rub her jaw. The pain is a welcome distraction from her anxiety about how reviewers will respond to
The Romantic,
which is officially published this Saturday. “When people say reviews and prizes don’t matter, they are wrong,” she says. They do matter, because they mean sales and income.
Even though her basement bookshelves are lined with copies of her foreign editions, and
The Romantic
has already been sold to the United States and several other countries, and
Falling Angels
and
Mister Sandman
are both being made into films, Gowdy has a bad case of the bag-lady syndrome. She fears she will end up living on the streets, or borrowing money from family and friends, and holing up in somebody’s basement. ►