| Ann-Marie MacDonald’s life resembles the plot line of a literary fairy tale. An award-winning playwright and actor turns fiction writer and wins the coveted Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book with the darkly comic and brilliant Fall On Your Knees. Her book tops the best-seller list for a year and then later, when most book sales should be waning, she is discovered by that most ardent and influential reader of all – Oprah Winfrey – and the novel gets another boost with U.S. sales exceeding one million.
It is rumoured that the advance for her new book was $1 million. The breathless hype in the press kit heralds The Way the Crow Flies (Knopf Canada) as the most anticipated book this fall. At over 700 pages, it is also assuredly among the largest of all of the fall fiction offerings lining bookstore shelves.
Readers will find that The Way the Crow Flies mines some of the same territory as Fall On Your Knees – family secrets, buried events and complex human relationships. The new novel is set in the optimistic early 1960s. It recounts the story of precocious eight-year-old Madeleine McCarthy, a gypsy Air Force brat whose family is now based in Centralia, Ontario. A murder on the base divides the community and young Madeleine is forced to confront the moral ambiguity of adult life.
After seven years of toiling at her desk, MacDonald is once again out in the public eye, the spotlight shining brightly on her as the reading public, the critics and other writers ponder two questions: How will the charming and cheeky brunette cope with the perils of success? And will her new book be able to match the success of the first one? No longer a neophyte novelist, the 40-something MacDonald is now expected to produce another masterful work of fiction.
When I spoke to her recently from her home in Toronto she was affable, very amusing and completely open about the terrors she had to grapple with when she sat at the keyboard to create book number two.
How did she get down to the business of writing The Way the Crow Flies? "It was bloody-minded diligence," she replies. "And it’s not that I wasn’t terrified and depressed every step of the way. But, you know what? The story deserves to be told. I’m not going to wimp out now, just ’cause it’s hard. I am as paranoid as everyone else – probably more so, ’cause writers are anyway."
Like the heroine of her new novel, MacDonald’s father was in the Air Force and much of her childhood was spent moving from base to base. It was then that she began reading the kind of big, engrossing novels she now writes.
"The first thing I read was Huckleberry Finn," she recalls. "That book changed my life. I was eight. Then I read Jane Eyre and then I read it four more times. And, of course, I read the Narnia series. And all of these books were intoxicating in their own ways."
However, Shakespeare wasn’t on her reading list. Although she made her name as a playwright with a witty, feminist Shakespearean spoof, MacDonald admits she never cared much for the Bard before then.
"I didn’t really learn to love Shakespeare until I decided to take the piss out of him by writing the play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). Getting inside Shakespeare – treating him the way he treated everyone else – actually made me love Shakespeare. I went, ‘Oh, I get it now. He’s not the Bard against which we must rebel.’ Of course, those were my younger days, too. So that was a revelation for me."
Now that MacDonald is a successful writer, has she been worried that her new novel will make her vulnerable to attack as well?
"Well, I said to myself, ‘Buckle your seatbelt, there may be certain backlashes along the road in my home country.’ For the most part, I think I’m treated extremely well. People want to interview me and the readers are fantastic. The readers – that’s where it’s at and that is sustained. But, every now and then I’m noticing – now it’s a very small minority – someone’s trying to take a bite out of me. And I’m thinking that’s inevitable. They are biting me, not as a person who wrote a story, but as a person who has now become part of the cultural iconic currency."
MacDonald is also aware that she doesn’t fit the dignified image of a literary icon.
"I don’t exude dignity," she says. "I realize I might be punished now and then for making a living ’cause I’m a girl. And I think, despite best efforts, there is still a whiff of the old pixie hanging around. I’m still trying to get beyond that, ’cause I’m way too old now. But I’m still characterized that way sometimes, and I sort of think, ‘Just be yourself. Eventually, you’ll be grisly and old and they’ll want to give you a Legion of Honour and forget that you made a living.’"
For now, MacDonald is cherishing her success. As The Way the Crow Flies makes its way into readers’ hands this fall, the pundits and critics will have their say, and MacDonald will continue merrily doing what she does best – writing and taking the piss out of anyone who denies her that privilege.
Ann-Marie MacDonald reads Tuesday, October 7 at 7:30 p.m. at Knox United Church. Tickets are available from Ticketmaster (777-0000). |
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