Heather O'Neill on how motherhood and artistry intersect in her life and writing
The Montreal-based author discussed her latest novel The Capital of Dreams on Bookends with Mattea Roach
Not many people can say that their childhood consisted of time spent both on the playground and at Samuel Beckett plays.
With Heather O'Neill as a mother, it's a different story.
When O'Neill had her daughter, Arizona, she was 20, fresh out of university and ready to take on the world of intellectuals — but at first, she worried that that world was not conducive to a young single mother.
"I thought motherhood was so incompatible with a certain type of creativity and intellectual life," she said on the first episode of Bookends with Mattea Roach, CBC's new author interview show. "But nonetheless I had this child."
Navigating that experience was both wonderful and confusing, she said.
"I was so young and so there was this sort of back and forth with everything. I was like, 'I just can't do all this baby stuff. Let's just choose — we'll do one activity for you and one activity for me.'" And that's how they went from the playground to Beckett.
It's these tensions between being a mother and an artist that show up in O'Neill's latest novel The Capital of Dreams, which follows 14-year-old Sofia who lives in a war-torn country with her famous writer mother.
When the enemy country starts burning the work of intellectuals and artists, Sofia decides to flee with her mother's latest unpublished manuscript. But in the chaos of war, she loses it and finds herself on a dangerous quest to get it back.
The world in The Capital of Dreams is teeming with intrigue, peril and even a philosophical talking goose, jumping from Sofia's current adventures on the run to flashbacks showing her strained relationship with her mother Clara — which was partially influenced by O'Neill's own experiences.
Real-life inspiration
Born in Montreal, O'Neill spent her early years in Virginia, where she and her sisters lived with her mother after her parents split up. When Heather was nine, her mother sent them back to Montreal to live with their father.
"I couldn't really participate in the artistic milieu of New York or where she wanted to go, you know?," she said. "There were just so many sort of strange ways that I didn't fit into her idea of what a woman was."
She drew inspiration from her mother for Clara's character, who constantly scrutinizes her daughter Sofia.
"That was so much the feeling I had, like what I remembered from my mother, that I hadn't felt loved at all and I felt that she thought I was an unworthy companion in life and she had just rejected me for not being, I don't know, cool or edgy."
But she also notes a key difference — Clara does love Sofia and is doing her best to raise her, her art just comes first.
"She really represented the Simone de Beauvoir type for me," said O'Neill. The character of Clara set out to explore what it would be like if de Beauvoir had a child, since she had been so vocal about not having children. "She had said you can't be an existentialist if you have a child."
But O'Neill is proof that motherhood and artistry can go hand in hand. She's the author of six books that often feature the subtext of fairy tales, drawing from moments of play with her daughter.
A homerun debut novel
The searing prose, sharp humour and strong voice of her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals left an impact on readers. The work explores the gritty realities of 13-year-old Baby, whose mother is dead and father is an addict, as she wanders the streets of Montreal and bridges the gap between her adult realities with her vivid, child-like imagination.
Lullabies for Little Criminals went on to become a finalist for the Giller Prize and win Canada Reads in 2007, launching O'Neill's literary career as one of Canada's most prominent contemporary writers.
And as she rose the literary ranks, Arizona was always by her side. In an interview with CBC Books in January, O'Neill recalled taking Arizona to the downtown bookstore to celebrate when Lullabies for Little Criminals won Canada Reads.
"We sat up in the gallery and, because there was a wall of my books, we watched people walk in and take the book to buy it," she said. "Every time one of them took a book off the shelf, we would jump up and down and applaud."
Now, Arizona is an illustrator, writer and film director, and the two even run an Instagram account together where they share book recommendations.
Since O'Neill's debut, she became the first back-to-back finalist for the Giller Prize for The Girl Who Was Saturday Night in 2014 and her short story collection Daydreams of Angels in 2015. Her other novels are The Lonely Hearts Hotel and When We Lost Our Heads, two historical fiction titles with roots in Montreal.
Earlier this year, she also made history as the first person to win Canada Reads as both an author and a panellist, championing The Future by Catherine Leroux, translated by Susan Ouriou, a speculative fiction novel that imagines an alternate future where the French never left Detroit.
A whole new world
The Capital of Dreams is a somewhat unintentional departure from her previous work — it's not set in Montreal and includes a mother character — and it also falls much more into the world of the fantastical.
"It's strange because I don't always think about what the book is going to be. I just work on it and it builds itself," she said.
In fact, when she handed in The Lonely Hearts Hotel, her editor made a comment that it's yet another book with motherless children. "I was like, 'Note to myself, put a mother in once in a while.'"
And when she finally did so in The Capital of Dreams, Clara was even only meant to be a secondary character.
"Sometimes I put these characters in the book and I want them to be secondary, but they absolutely refuse to be secondary characters in any way. And they just become bigger and bigger," she said.
By having a character like Clara, O'Neill also wanted to feature a middle-aged woman, however flawed, especially as someone living that experience herself, and celebrate a time period in a woman's life that doesn't receive enough attention.
"It's just this major time of Renaissance and power for women," she said.
"I just wanted a character who kind of embodied that: a woman who just owns coming into her age and has all these accomplishments — and she's just so proud of them."
This interview was produced by Lisa Mathews.
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