Interview with author Gail Anderson-Dargatz

Canadian Living: What was your inspiration for the book?

Gail Anderson-Dargatz: I helped to evacuate my own parents from the Salmon Arm fire of 1998, a fire that precipitated the largest peacetime evacuation in B.C.'s history up to that point. I knew I would write about it someday, even as we lived through it. It was a horrific, but at times visually stunning event. Fire literally rained down from the sky. We were all put on 10- minute evacuation alert, so our focus was on our possessions, what to take and what to leave behind.

In our own case, and in the case of almost everyone I interviewed who had lived through the fireball event that swept through the Salmon Valley, the choices over what to take were not monetary. Rather the objects we all salvaged were the ones that held memory for us: family heirlooms, children's drawings, photographs. I remember arguing with my mother over her basket collection. She was determined to take them. I understand now. It was a hard-won treasure gleaned over the years.

The focus of the book is in part on possessions, those objects that define us, and remind us of who we are. To that end I included photos of my own treasured family heirlooms, taken by photographer Mitch Krupp (who is also my husband). We worked for a year on those photos, deciding which objects to use, doing photo shoots with them and retaking them. As I did this, I told him about the family stories connected to those objects and new plot lines and details arose from that process. In the end the novel changed profoundly through that collaboration.

CL: Kat has a child, parents and a husband to care for. Do you think she's representative of the average Canadian woman of her age in this way? What does this say about our society? Are women destined to be caregivers?

GA: I've just hit my middle years and man, is there a lot going on! I've got young children and teenagers, and as I wrote this novel I helped to nurse my father and then my mother during their final years. My father passed away as I began this book. My mother had a stroke and passed away as I completed it. As I went through all that with my sisters, I talked to a great many other women and sometimes men who were caring for their spouses and parents. It's a hard time for many of us in that "sandwich generation" who are pulled one way by our children, another by our aging parents, and by our work as well. It is most often women in this role, but not always.

My initial goal in writing this book was to give a unflinching portrait of the caregiver, how very hard it is on the caregiver and on all family relationships. A long-term illness of almost any kind and particularly one like stroke turns relationships on their heads. A husband becomes a parent to his wife, a daughter a mother to her own mother. I remember the moment when I realized this had occurred with my mom. She was upset and to comfort her I stroked her hair as I would my three-year-old, as I would not have allowed myself to otherwise. I went out into the hallway and cried.

CL: Do you believe in true love? Or is love really about being needed?

GA: Oh, I so believe in true love. I experience it each day in my own marriage, if by true love you mean that give and take between equal partners. When, as I said above, a marriage loses that quality of equality, when one partner becomes parent to another, then you're in real trouble. So no, I don't believe true love is about "being needed." It's about mutual respect between two adults, among a great many other things. Compatibility. A willingness to engage. A shared commitment to work through problems. And va-va-voom: Passion!

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