The Changing World of Bonnie Burnard
Like any fiction writer, I want to examine the human condition, and I usually stay with my own time and place, or with the recent past. I do this because I love the gathering power of memory, because I am drawn to the things that come back to me, with a second life. The ways of talking, the complicated assumptions, the parents, the dances, the friends, the men, the lake.
When I began to write, I was a woman with dark hair and young kids, and short stories seemed at least possible. I am indebted to Coteau Books, a small publishing house run by writers and book lovers, for my first collection, Women of Influence. Soon after its publication, I was in the hands of an agent, Jan Whitford, who placed my second collection, Casino & Other Stories, with Phyllis Bruce at HarperCollins. Because the beloved Jack Rabinovich wanted to bring readers to Canadian fiction, he had just launched the Giller Prize, and to my amazement, Casino was shortlisted. When my novel A Good House won the Giller, I accepted the award with uncharacteristic emotion (but perhaps characteristic rambling) because, in a split second, I had become the luckiest writer alive. Luckiest because I have never written to please anyone but myself, and also because I know more than a few Canadian writers whose work has not received the exposure it plainly deserves.
A writer like me cannot consciously predetermine the moral compass of her work because that would be a distraction, and the cost could be high, but looking back from here and now, I see that most of my fiction has tended to concentrate on my characters’ ability, or inability, to evolve. To adapt either to external circumstance, or to each other, or to their own changed selves.
In the story “Crush,” a young girl’s perfectly healthy, emerging sexuality prompts a grieving evolution in her mother and a quick, survival-based heads-up for the oblivious but decent bread man who is the object of her surprising lust. In the story “Casino,” a fire in a dance hall at the lake causes commonplace men to call up their instinct and strength, to put their commonplace love into action, as men can.
In A Good House, which is told over several generations, a family evolves from rural life through town and on to city life, facing in each decade birth and death and accidents and handicaps, good marriages and bad, and behaviour that is both beneath and beyond what they might have expected. What matters, of course, is, If a character can adapt, how exactly is it done? Is the change natural or clumsy, harmful or selfless? Is the failure cowardly or brave?
Suddenly is meant to be a study of both lifelong friendship among women and of the demands of sexual devotion in marriage. As Sandra approaches her own imminent death — and with it the loss of her grown children — Jack, her husband, and Colleen and Jude, her good friends of thirty years, take up their responsibility to help her. As she prepares herself, Sandra comes to love memory as much as I do, and all of them, with all of their skill and failure and stupidity and strength, are changed.
An intimate partnership, a marriage, is always interesting. But so is friendship among women, with its own loyalties and limitations. Like marriage, friendship among women is work, and it’s risky. It is sometimes less than we need but just as often more than we deserve. Maybe it’s the ease that interests me, with most of the elemental stories — about parents, about childhood about careers, about kids, even sometimes about men — long since told. Maybe women can walk into a room together or sit having lunch with that strange, relaxed confidence because so much is known, because so many stories have already been heard. Stories that will include, if the friendship is lucky and profound, some truth.
There are no evil twins in my work, nothing explodes. There is no perversion or greed or war, no endless, plotted death. And it has occurred to me that I have ducked the larger question, the question of evil. But some time in twenty years of publishing fiction, I must have decided to stay close to, to keep watch over, the thing that perversion and greed and war destroy, which is our small evolutionary need to simply live with — and if we can, to adapt with — our partners and children and friends. Because, as much as monstrous weakness, this too seems to be securely in our nature. I think believing it makes me a realist.
Bonnie Burnard, March 2009.
Buy Bonnie Burnard’s latest book, Suddenly
Browse Inside to read more from A Good House
Browse Inside to read more from Casino and Other Stories
