FFWD Weekly
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Books by Gaelle Eizlini In another time, Joan Barfoot would have been called a dame. Not so much a brash as a no-bullshit, tell-it-like-it-is kind of a woman. These days, unless you’re an accomplished British stage actress, being called a dame is another one of those politically borderline expressions – probably safer not to use that particular description. But Barfoot lives up to it because she is not the sort of woman to be squeamish about which expressions aren’t fashionable or safe. Don’t like what she has to say? Get over it and move on. The length of Barfoot’s career has given her a dame’s ability to look the truth square in the eye and laugh in its face. "If you don’t count my aunt’s Dairy Queen, my first job was at a local paper where I was the baby reporter. I was hired right out of high school," she says. However, it is her humour more than anything else that qualifies Barfoot for dame status. A negative review will not prompt a tirade on the qualifications of reviewers or a morose "Oh, God! I knew it" response. Barfoot lights her cigarette and wryly notes that the poor reviewer’s worst quality may be being doomed to a lifetime without a decent sense of humour. That is probably the most important aspect of Barfoot’s personality, and it is apparent in her work. Known for her rather dark humour, she nevertheless avoids being needlessly cruel or brandishing it as a weapon. "You know, it’s one of the ways people have perspective on things. You have to laugh, even at really horrible things, at some point. Sometimes you’re weeping or you’re killing yourself laughing." Though she’s been a journalist since she was 17, her career as a novelist didn’t begin until she was 28. "I wanted to spend more time with stories and characters – that was the main reason for going into fiction. I was interested in secrets." That drive to flush out secrets has roots in journalism, but Barfoot's interest is in the repercussions of the discovery of secrets. It’s a theme that recurs in her work. "There is a big difference between privacies and secrets. In fiction, the secret isn’t so much the point. It’s the revelation. So whatever it is has to be powerful enough to affect other people. I can have a secret, but it won’t matter crap to anybody but me. You have to have a secret that will have a huge impact, even though it may be pretty boring, really." The combination of journalistic experience and fiction writing has made her merciless with her oeuvre, as she affectionately calls it. "I’ve been a journalistic editor and I’m quite a good one, so I’m pretty brutal with my own stuff. Rewriting doesn’t bother me at all. Cutting the shit out of things doesn’t trouble me, hitting the delete button on entire pages and chapters, nothing. I’m very cold – if it works, it lives; if it doesn’t, it dies. By and large there’s not a whole lot of editing by the time I’m ready to present the novel," she says. "Although, I do have a bad way with semi-colons. I just throw them everywhere. If I take a little breath, I use a comma, if I take a longer breath, I use a semi-colon. If I practically pass out, I use a period. As a smoker, I find punctuation is a lifesaver. But apparently, this isn’t the grammatical way to do things."

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