Lightning strikes twice
THERE’S LITTLE SURPRISE LEARNING THE BOOK TOOK FIVE YEARS TO DEVELOP
Be Ready for the Lightning By Grace O’Connell Random House Canada 304 pp; $24.95
Grace O’Connell has published two very good novels and half a dozen top-notch short stories, winning awards for that writing and earning something like darling status in CanLit’s close- knit literary community along the way. Grace has one of those little blue checkmarks next to her Twitter handle, too, the kind verifying publicly that you are indeed the person you say you are and that that person has very much arrived.
But grabbing seats at Northwood, a hip bar ten or so blocks south of Grace’s new digs in Seaton Village, I realize Grace O’Connell has somehow gone and made me feel like the coolest person in the room. Caught in Grace’s cyclone of charm, my recorder hasn’t started blinking before she’s halfway through a series of rapid- fire courtesy questions directed at boring, baseborn me.
“Are you cocktail-friendly?” she asks, huge, brown, linerrimmed eyes darting up from a floppy bar menu. Um, yes, though I’ve never heard this term in my life. Grace grabs a drink, but therein ends most any clichéd writer habits for the Toronto author. My tea arrives ten minutes before Grace’s Violet Hour ( a temporary shortage of whipped egg whites to blame) and she insists immediately that I go on ahead without her.
When Grace finally takes her first sip of the tequilacharged cocktail some time later, I’m still trying to steady my own sober nerves, the long-time O’Connell enthusiast inside me bounding with nervous excitement. Tempering compliment and coherent thought, I eventually manage to tell Grace this: I keep two copies of her book, Magnified World, on my shelf at nearly all times – one for me and one for the friend I’ll inevitably be sending it to with strong recommendation soon. Magnified World, I tell them, is a masterpiece of a debut, arriving via the same New Face of Fiction program that launched names such as Yann Martel and Ami McKay.
Following Maggie, bereaved 20-something recently short a parent to suicide, Magnified World takes lifelong Torontonians through both the city they know well and another beneath it: a vivid look at how grief can be, well, magnified by the world around us, ringing true on the page and revealing Grace’s great knack for keen observation.
Magnified World was written and workshopped during Grace’s MFA at nearby University of Guelph; if the book’s technical skill – evident in sharply drawn passages and striking sketches of character throughout – allude to her academic background, the habits that land- ed Grace such savvy don’t really say the same.
“A lot of writers abide by the once- a- day schedule of writing to make their best work. I really can’t do that. For me it’s more feast or famine.” Big swaths of time, she tells me, mostly in the night, while TO politico partner, Trinity-Spadina Ward Councillor Joe Cressy, sleeps one room over. Otherwise her home life is admittedly mundane: barbecues and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, mostly, Grace laughing lightly at her own humdrum hobbies.
“My writing is the most interesting thing about me. I don’t have a bizarre, eccentric, artistic life happening outside of the pages that would fascinate anyone.”
Youngest of three, Grace knew early she’d be making a go of the author thing; in a family fond of more stable roads – her older siblings both teachers – the kid- sister was gambling on a trade rarely kind to new faces. Here, today, little blue checkmark and all, Grace seems more or less to have made good on her younger self ’s big dreams, byline peppered regularly across magazines and newspapers Canadawide. Grace also teaches her craft at University of Toronto as a professor in the school’s continuing- ed program for aspiring writers, a rough age bracket from which she’s not that far removed herself.
Grace’s latest novel is another example of the author bucking textbook writing tools to great effect: Be Ready for the Lightning is a family drama written at thriller’s pace, the story of one Vancouver woman’s experience held hostage in a Manhattan city bus. Like Magnified World, it’s influenced strongly by self-examination, some clever riff on “would you rather,” asking readers almost pointblank what spooks them more: demons in broad daylight, or the ones dwelling more silently within?
No easy answer and hardly a simple question to tackle, there’s little surprise learning the book took nearly five years – and three apartments – to develop. I ask Grace if her life’s intermittent wander changed Be Ready for the Lightning much since its conception.
“I don’t know if I changed the book or if it changed me. I think a book is an artifact of your own emotional life at the time.”
If that’s true, I don’t envy whatever stewardship Grace needed offer her little artifact to deliver what it is today. Be Ready for the Lightning totals you with a tidal flow of fear, suspense, affection and the singular brand of sadness that accompanies hard truth told well. Be ready for the lightning strike in your backyard, it says, but maybe do better knowing that flicker’s got nothing on the thunder rumbling within.
What’s more is looking back, Grace’s personal development has been almost perfectly mirrored in her novel’s own evolution as well, book and author making their way around the wringer with two re-writes and a major POV change in the span.
“Third time’s a charm, I hope?” Grace says, voice lifting gently, speaking it seems about the novel as much as that homely life she’s found herself living lately.