NEW NOVEL DAZZLES
The story behind Little Sister
Little Sister Barbara Gowdy Harper Collins
Barbara Gowdy is back. Given the circumstances, that’s really saying something.
One of Canada’s most popular and acclaimed literary figures, Windsor-born Gowdy was also, for a long time, one of the most prolific, with seven books in the 19 years spanning her 1988 debut, Through the Green Valley, and the controversial novel Helpless.
That pace then slowed considerably with a decade-long hiatus that is now broken with Little Sister.
Set in Toronto in 2005, the novel centres on 34-year-old Rose, a single woman running a struggling repertory cinema with her widowed mother, Fiona. For Rose, the strain of watching over her mother, who has early-stage dementia, and unresolved guilt over the childhood death of her younger sister appears to find unsought relief, or at least distraction, in a case of identity transference.
During a series of severe summer thunderstorms, Rose finds herself occupying the body of a suicidal woman named Harriet, and comes to think she can save this mysterious woman where she failed her sister. A rich dynamic unfolds whereby a daughter’s consciousness expands while a mother’s disintegrates. The book not only taps into two of the defining subjects of our time — dementia and climate anxiety — but pulls off the trademark Gowdy feat of shifting the reader deftly between the comfortingly familiar and the queasily metaphysical. It’s an intellectual thriller that fully does justice to both halves of that designation.
There is, of course, the small matter of why Little Sister has taken so long to appear. The answer, as Gowdy has only recently chosen to publicly disclose, lies with something that started as long as 15 years ago but intensified to crisis proportions just as she was starting to work on the new novel: debilitating chronic lowerback pain, to the point where she couldn’t stand for any significant length of time or sit at all.
That leaves only one position: Gowdy wrote Little Sister lying on her back, in bed, typing on a propped-up laptop in the intervals when the pain and the painkillers permitted, with her longtime partner, poet Christopher Dewdney, providing in-home support. Then, last fall, just as she was finishing the book and a degree of relief had been found, she received a diagnosis of breast cancer. Treated with medication, surgery and radiation, the condition is in remission.
“It saps you of your strength and energy, sometimes even of your will,” Gowdy, 66, said of her back odyssey, speaking from her home in Toronto’s Cabbagetown. “All that time I was going on and off drugs, seeking therapy everywhere.
“I had gone right away to a chiropractor, who said she couldn’t help me at all and I was wasting my money. After that, hardly a week went by when I wasn’t getting on or off some regimen or another, talk- ing to someone across the country who was going to help me with mindfulness brain stuff, flying off to get injections in Italy.
“None of it helped, from surgery to extreme quackery and everything in between, and it was all hugely expensive and timeconsuming.”
Subscribing to the “when you need help, put it out there” credo, Gowdy was eventually steered, by a fellow sufferer and friend who’s a violinist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, to a retired doctor whose treatment leaned on first principles.
“Basically, he believes it’s all about posture,” Gowdy said. “Forget Pilates, forget yoga, forget everything else. Just stand up straight and sit up straight. Weirdly, after all I’ve been through, it came down to that, and remarkably, it has brought me some comfort.”
When Gowdy says she’s “feeling better,” the words carry real weight. Stepping back into the pop-culture fray, she can take further comfort in knowing that her large and loyal following — many of whom came on board with Kissed, the film adaptation of a necrophilia-themed story from the collection We So Seldom Look on Love, and the bestselling elephant-perspective novel The White Bone — have been waiting for her, and that they will be treated to a new book that ranks among her very best.
Of course, that relationship did hit a speed bump with Helpless, a novel that sought to get into the head of a child abductor.
Loyalty notwithstanding, in this case many readers, some of them mothers for whom the subject struck at a primal fear, weren’t willing to make the leap Gowdy asked. In Britain, the book’s adaptation for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime caused a media tempest.
“It was well reviewed, but it didn’t sell,” said Gowdy bluntly, even while hinting that she may attempt a screen adaptation, probably for TV. “People are more ready for stories like this now, I think. They’ve been primed by some of the more adventurous cable series of the last 10 years.”
Though she says she doesn’t yet have a solid idea for her next fiction project, Gowdy’s passion for writing and books is reassuringly undimmed. In the course of our conversation, she plugged George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (“It’s tempting to place Lincoln as the opposite of Trump, but let’s not forget, a whole lot of people died in the Civil War”) and two old favourites: Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Georges Simenon’s The Train.
The Simenon might be a subliminal hint at the apprehension she’s feeling as she gets set to embark on her first promotional round since pain became a part of her life.
“I’m worried about sitting on trains and in planes, where, as we all know, seats are ergonomically punishing,” she said.
“I’m not sure I can stand for very long to read, and I’m not sure I can sit for very long if I’m on a stage with other writers for a group event. I’ve asked for pillows to be provided backstage.”
That’s a degree of dedication few writers are asked to summon.
“Well, it’s the least I can do for my publisher. They’ve been wonderful and supportive through all this. So I’m stocking up on oxycodone.”
The book … pulls off the trademark Gowdy feat of shifting the reader deftly between the comfortingly familiar and the queasily metaphysical.