Unlocking the human power of fairy tales
Author’s characters are pushing boundaries beyond this novel
When Amanda Leduc started working on her wild, spellbinding novel “The Centaur’s Wife” several years ago, she thought she was writing about desire.
What she got was a book about desire, sure, but one that pushed boundaries, incorporating fairy tales featuring disabled characters, groundbreaking accessibility and a mainstream publisher.
“It’s definitely been a wild ride,” Leduc says in an interview.
“I know three years in the grand scheme of things isn’t that long to write a book, but it felt like a really long time.”
It began with imagining a taboo relationship between a woman and a centaur, a Greek mythological creature with a human upper body and the lower extremities of a horse.
“I was interested in what it means when you desire someone that you can’t have,” says Leduc, who lives in Hamilton. “Someone that doesn’t fit into your life for a wide variety of reasons.”
But as Leduc began writing what she initially thought was a novella, the tentacles of her apocalyptic story began to curl and pull in other parts of her life. In some ways, the book’s growth mirrors the themes of “The Centaur’s Wife,” in which an unnamed city, existing in the shadow of a looming mountain, is destroyed after meteors hit Earth. The few remaining survivors watch as thick vines begin rapidly growing across backyards and streets, almost as if the world is healing itself.
“The Centaur’s Wife” follows two women, Heather and Tasha, as they find different ways to cope. Heather — who gives birth to fiery-haired twin daughters as the destruction hits — has cerebral palsy, like Leduc.
While the mountain is a source of deep fear because of local legends, Heather finds herself drawn back there seeking Estajfan, a centaur who grew up isolated on the mountain because his father, Petrolio, recognized the dangers that humans pose to the half-human creatures.
It’s not an exact metaphor for how a disabled body moves through the world, but Leduc found parallels in how both Heather and Estajfan are treated and constrained in expressing their desires and needs.
“I was thinking about the ways in which we traditionally have institutionalized the disabled body and kept the disabled person outside of ‘normal’ functioning society,” says Leduc. “Society is not built for it and does not understand what the different body is.”
Tasha, who is a doctor, is dealing with a personal tragedy when the meteors crash. She arrives at the city with her wife, Annie, and a group of survivors in hopes of rebuilding a communal society. But even as some lose confidence in her leadership, Tasha refuses to give up her vision.
In late 2019, after Leduc had finished the manuscript, her best friend Jess — to whom the book is dedicated — died.
“The Centaur’s Wife,” with Tasha and Heather’s intertwining stories, became a surprising road map of grief.
“That experience over the last year of walking through a world that’s been totally destroyed and making connections with other people — in my case, Jess’s family — has been a really important part of my growth and my healing,” says Leduc. “It’s so magical that as writers, we are often writing toward things that haven’t even happened yet. But if you think too much and you tried to pin too much of that down, it loses its power.”
Another serendipitous event occurred as Leduc was writing her novel. In early 2019, she started work on “Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space” for Coach House Books. The thin non-fiction volume reveals how villains and heroes in traditional fairy tales, and later in the Disney and Marvel universes, are coded according to their physical features.
Leduc, who is an unabashed Disney fan (“The Little Mermaid” is a favourite), expertly breaks down these childhood stories and their influences on how we view other bodies. Disney villains, for instance, are recognizable by their physical disfigurations and scars.
As she was writing “Disfigured,” it occurred to Leduc that she had the power to write her own fairy tales for “The Centaur’s Wife,” which are interspersed throughout the novel and offer greater insight into her characters’ inner worlds.
“I realized that the people in this novel are telling each other stories in order to make sense of the grief that they’re feeling and make sense of the catastrophe that’s happening around them,” she says.
Unlike other parts of the book that only came together after numerous rewrites, the fairy tales came quickly to Leduc.
“That is always a part of writing that you live for,” she says. “Those moments are few and far between when you’re like, ‘Oh, that feels easy.’ It’s fantastic.”
While “Disfigured” made a mark as the first book in Canada to be published in all-accessible and traditional formats simultaneously — including on e-Braille and physical Braille — “The Centaur’s Wife” will be the first book published that way for Random House Canada.
Leduc is thrilled that her book will find its way to many more readers without delays. But she hopes other authors and publishers will also wield their power to make more titles available to millions of disabled Canadians.
“Ideally you don’t want to be the only book,” Leduc says. “You don’t want that to be a big story because you want all books to be accessible.”