The guest speakers, two professional "wordsmiths" as someone put it, knew how to make their dialogue compelling. I felt I was eavesdropping on a private conversation, so exclusive and personal did it seem: an illusion, deliberately and skillfully contrived.
Elizabeth Hay's book All Things Consoled is about her relationship with her parents. Although she's primarily a writer of fiction, she considers the real world to be more interesting.
Her father, like Albert Camus, was a man who spurned fiction in favour of non-fiction. A high-school principal, he ruled the roost. Her mother was his "counterpoint".
"I keep track of things," says Elizabeth Hay, constantly taking notes; All Things Consoled had originated as an unpublished series of short stories. ("I'm always looking for stories.") Her editor had persuaded her to make the book biographical instead, and advised her to "start with the crisis!" Elizabeth realised in any case that she was incapable of giving her parents fictional names. "I couldn't pretend they weren't who they were."
Her goal with these family memoirs was simply to end up with a good book. Alan Neal probed further: did her siblings mind?
She laughed. "I don't ask [their] permission!" She warned her brother and sister she was writing this book and sent them a copy once she had finished. "Happily, they're all still talking to me."
She hates talking on the phone; it makes her feel "cornered". She likes being left alone.
While her father was still alive, she felt unable to write about his anger. Her mother was a gentle soul, an artist, whose studio was her true home. Elizabeth called her death from pneumonia an escape. ("Pneumonia, the old person's friend!") For Elizabeth too it was an escape, from the pain of looking after her mother. When they were younger she remembers how her mother's creative drive was thwarted, how she was not happy until she had work to do as an artist. The two of them handled rejection and disappointment in the same way. "I just wish we could get a little recognition," her mother used to say. In the end, both of them did. In 2007, Elizabeth won the Giller Prize, and has other awards besides. The room we saw in the background on the Zoom webinar was decorated with her mother's paintings and other artwork. She calls it the Mumsaleum.
When Elizabeth was 15, the family moved to England for a year where she went to school, clearly a formative experience. She says she has "muscle/joint memory" feeling emotion through her knees, always going shaky in the knees when something overwhelms her.
"I thought I was a poet," said Elizabeth. "It surprised me to write novels; I was always drawn to stories."
She appreciates honest reactions to any work-in-progress and gets her husband and son to act as editors. "What I try to do is hit something real ... and surprising. Then I hit the ground and keep going."
Alan gently pressed her to divulge what sort of book she is working on now, but she refused to say. He managed to extract the admission that it is based on something she published before, resuming the narrative in 2008. He startled her at the end of the conversation by holding up a copy of four poems she had written long ago.
"Wherever did you find those?"
"Dig deep enough," he answered, "and you find stuff!"
No comments:
Post a Comment