Photo by Mitch Krupp
GA: Beth is, of course, closest to my heart. She's travelled with me for many years now. When I returned to the Shuswap-Thompson to write this book, I had no intention of writing a sequel to The Cure for Death by Lightning, and this book isn't really that. But Beth turned up and tapped me on the shoulder. I fought it for a while, but she wouldn't go away. She had more to say. And I'm so glad I let her come back to tell her story.
CL: What is your favourite part of the book and why?
GA: I have so many favourite parts, but the passage I read most often at readings is the "hat full of butterflies" section near the end of the book as it sums up the feelings of nostalgia, of loss, and the themes of memory that I wrote of in this book. Also, the very end of the novel, that last car ride with Beth, makes me cry each time I read it, because I wrote this section as nonfiction first, after a car ride with my own mother, when she started to show real signs of mental decline, and I knew I was losing her.
CL: Can you describe your writing process?
GA: I teach a year-long program at UBC that describes my writing process! But to sum it up, to this point at least, I've taken family stories or personal stories as a starting place. Then I've interviewed as many people as I can find who have been through something similar, looking for patterns, behaviours we'd all share if put in that particular set of circumstances. Here, in the interviews, is where I find characters, plot lines and those details that make the writing authentic. So while I start with the personal, I use interviews and research to move that small story into something larger, into the universal, into fiction.
CL: What books and authors are you inspired by?
GA: There are so many! Probably my all-time favorite book is Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth. I love Toni Morrison's writing and often use her novel Beloved in the courses I teach at UBC. My list of favourite Canadian novels reads like a Can Lit course so I won't repeat it here other than to say reading Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women was a revelation. I read it when I was quite young and remember thinking, "This book is about me! So I can write about my own stories!" In other words, my own life as a young Canadian woman was not only worth writing about, but worth celebrating.
CL: If you were leading a book club discussion of this book, what are some questions you'd like to see discussed?
GA: The first question that comes to mind is: "If you had 10 minutes to flee a forest fire, what would you take?" And then, "What would you leave behind?" We don't think about that often, but when we do it has the effect of making us very aware of where our priorities are, and what we can live without.
Then I might suggest the women ask themselves, honestly, "If you were at the fork in the road that Kat is at, what decision would you make? Would you stay? Leave? Run away with Jude? Or do something completely different?" The answer to this question wasn't at first evident to me, the author. I have several alternate endings.
And then: "Are there caregivers in your life? Do they always behave as they 'should'? Do they behave badly at times? If so, why? What do they go through? How can you help? What have you gone through as a caregiver?"
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