SISTERHOOD & SELF-DISCOVERY
Dual Citizens a story about life’s battle to figure out who you are
Being chosen as a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s top literary award, is an honour as well as a great piece of public relations as Vancouver-based author Alix Ohlin has noticed.
“In Canada it brings you a lot more readers. People pay attention to all books on the short list,” said Ohlin, whose Dual Citizens earned her a 2019 nod.
“In my experience talking to people at festivals they’ll say: ‘My book club reads the whole short list,’ or something like that. So it is a great opportunity for a writer. People who might not have encountered your work before will come to it, so it’s exciting.”
Ohlin will be talking to more festivalgoers soon as she, along with other Giller nominees David Bezmozgis, Megan Gail Coles, Michael Crummey, Steven Price and Ian Williams, will take part in An Evening with the Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalists on Oct. 21, part of the Vancouver Writers Festival (VWF). Born and raised in Montreal, Ohlin has been the chair of, and an instructor in, the creative writing program at UBC since January of 2018. Dual Citizens is her second novel to be shortlisted for the Giller. Her novel Inside received that accolade back in 2012.
Dual Citizens is a story about motherhood, sisterhood, partnerships and the lifelong battle of figuring out who you are and what that actually means.
At the centre of the story is narrator Lark Brossard, who as a kid in Montreal had to stick together with little sister Robin in order to combat the unpredictable antics of their narcissistic and mercurial mother Marianne.
The sisters survive childhood, barely, and move on to their own lives. Lark heads off to college near Boston, but that thrill of independence doesn’t last for long as a volatile and often very unstable Robin, a piano virtuoso, shows up and sucks the air out of the room.
“With sisters the relationship is often very intense, very complicated, very multi-faceted and it evolves over time,” said Ohlin.
“I was really interested in the complexity of that and the tumult the way your sister can be your closest friend but also the person that you most kind of push against or compete with or whatever it is.
I felt that all of the tension and emotion felt like rich material for fiction for me.”
Over four decades the story moves from Montreal to outside of Boston to New York, rural Pennsylvania, Brooklyn, and then back to Quebec. Finally in the end, after years of putting others first and managing her unstable sister, Lark finally realizes that it’s her turn to ask for help.
“I didn’t set out to write about mental health, but I am interested in the frailty of human people and the way that relationships can sometimes make us very vulnerable and sometimes give us strength. I’m really interested in caretaking and dynamics around caretaking,” said Ohlin.
“There is that kind of reversal of pattern that happens over the course of the book.”
When she is not completely sequestered by her own writing — Ohlin now has three novels and two short story collections to her credit and is working on a third story collection — she is busy with her university jobs. The academic life has been her world since she first taught high school in the early 2000s.
With an undergraduate degree from Harvard and an MFA from the University of Texas, Ohlin taught at a handful of colleges in the U.S. before becoming the Mordecai Richler Writer in Residence at Mcgill in 2017.
“It is two different worlds, but to me they are quite complementary. I do really enjoy my alone time with my writing, but I also really enjoy community and interacting with other people and putting on my daytime clothes,” said Ohlin. “For me it has been a good balance and the structure of going to work and talking to other people about writing has always seemed like a big bonus to me.”
A big part of Ohlin’s teaching is reading, which she loves. She requires her students to read an article that appeared in the Guardian: George Saunders: What writers really do when they write.
“He talks about it as a very intuitive process of trial and error and how you don’t necessarily know what you are doing in advance and you just keep working your way through different versions of the idea,” said Ohlin about the article from the 2017 Booker Prize winner for Lincoln in the Bardo.
“It’s very reassuring for writers to hear that someone like George Saunders doesn’t necessarily know what he wants to do from the very beginning and that the process can develop. You don’t have to be perfect or right from the beginning. You just have to start and allow the process of drafting and revision to take place.”
For Ohlin, Saunders’ message is a great unifier and a great way to welcome students into her class.
“We’re all flailing around not knowing what we’re doing and in a writing program we can at least flail around together,” said Ohlin.
That togetherness idea carries through to Ohlin’s affinity for festivals like the VWF. It’s at these events the solitary writer is released into the world and given access to people who are actual book lovers.
“I really enjoy the chance to actually meet people who are reading the books. A book is a thing you live with in a private space for a very long time and the reader is a total abstraction, so the idea that there are real physical human beings who come to these spaces who are interested in hearing what writers have to say is a privilege.”