SHIFTING NARRATIVE
Author finds a place between darkness and light — because that’s life
Every Little Piece of Me Amy Jones Mcclelland & Stewart TORONTO
There are moments in Amy Jones’s new novel, Every Little Piece of Me, that are laugh-outloud funny. It happens with some of the lunatic text messages that punctuate its pages. It’s definitely present when she mercilessly punctures the pretensions of reality television. And it’s certainly there when the book’s 42-yearold author turns her sights on the grotesque dynamic underlying the relationship between today’s celebrity culture and social media.
But if you ask Jones about her gift for comic writing, she seems uncertain what to say. She confides that she was astonished when her previous novel, the bestselling We’re All In This Together, landed her on the shortlist for Canada’s Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.
“I think I’ve always had a sense of humour about things in general,” she says. “I enjoy watching comedy and reading comedy, but I never really thought of myself as a funny person when I was growing up.”
In the case of this new novel, she definitely doesn’t think it will end up in the Leacock sweepstakes. For sure, there’s the comedy, especially pages of scathing social satire, but a dark vein also waves its way through the story, carrying with it a sense of pervasive loss.
A narrative that shifts between darkness and light can pose a tricky challenge to any writer — but not, it seems, to Jones.
“We’re talking about two sides to the same coin,” she says in an interview at her publisher’s office. “I feel that life has these layers, so it’s not so much switching back and forth as it is looking at things from different perspectives.”
Those perspectives coalesce into one overriding concern in this novel: It has to do with preserving relationships and personal identity in an often unobliging culture. And, in the course of her fictional exploration, Jones has delivered two striking characters for whom fame leads to a spiral of self-destruction.
One is Mags Kovach, who we first encounter as the charismatic lead singer of a struggling Halifax rock band. The other is Ava Hart, the most rebellious member of a family dragged from the familiar urban comforts of Manhattan to rural Nova Scotia, where they will be stars of an inane reality TV project about running a small-town bed and breakfast business.
“I wanted to write about a friendship between two women,” Jones says. “There aren’t many books these days about two women who are rescuing each other as opposed to tearing each other down. For me, I sort of wanted to offer the idea that with a relationship you can find your way out of darkness and struggle.”
Every Little Piece of Me is ultimately a novel about the price of fame — the work of a writer who admits to her own love-hate relationship with internet culture and the social media.
“This is something in which a lot of people immerse themselves every day. I find it very fascinating — what we decide to share about ourselves, what gets shared about ourselves without our knowledge or consent, and also this idea that we’re constantly watching other people while other people are watching us.”
Throw in the culture of celebrity and you have a dangerously volatile mix. Jones felt she was taking “a deep dive” into this area while writing the novel. “There’s some really dark stuff when you drill into it — especially about how much people can project onto you.”
She cites the frequent plight of people in the public eye. “People now assume deep familiarity with them or project their own ideas and fantasies onto them.”
At the same time, this is a culture in which mass adulation can turn to loathing in a digital instant — a situation characters in the novel also suffer.
“I think that people often take pleasure in seeing people fall apart publicly,” Jones says. “We see it with celebrities who think they’re safe on their pedestal.”
She suggests that people have always enjoyed watching personal “train wrecks” within the celebrity world — “but we have more access to it now. It’s sort of happening in real time, and we can watch it play out in real time. That’s an aspect of the social media. It has this immediacy. There’s no processing time. People react immediately.”
Jones still finds positive aspects to social media. When she was living in Thunder Bay, Ont., the setting of her previous novel, she felt somewhat isolated despite an exciting local culture. But the internet made it possible to remain connected with a broader world.
“That was really helpful to me,” she says. “But in the last three or four years it’s changed so much. In the early days of social media, it seemed so innocent in a lot of ways. But today so much of Twitter is Donald Trump and stuff like that.”
This is the world in which the characters of Mags and Ava must live — and they’re not able to deal with it. Mags is driven by her love of song and wanting to make music — but “she has a love-hate relationship with fame because she knows it’s a necessity if she wishes to continue doing what she wants to do.”
Ava, the rebellious reality TV child, is still rebelling as she grows older.
“Her anger is born out of her sense of loss of control over her own life. That’s sort of magnified by the fact that her every move is being recorded and then edited and put together into a form that other people will want to look at.
“The thing about celebrity culture today is that feedback is instantaneous,” Jones says. “Young women struggling with their own identities and who they really are end up constantly being told by other people what those other people think you are ... so you have this schism. Your identity has sort of been foisted on you by all these outside forces.”
Jones believes these “forces” must be confronted in real life. “You have to figure out who you are on your own — and that can be a struggle.”
But despite her novel’s tough-minded look at today’s society, it’s the human factor that ultimately counts with Jones.
“One thing I definitely hope that people take away from my books,” she says, “is the feeling that even in your darkest times, even if you’re on a downward spiral, there’s always hope, always a way out.”
(Social media) is something in which a lot of people immerse themselves every day.
I find it very fascinating — what we decide to share about ourselves, what gets shared about ourselves without our knowledge or consent, and also this idea that we’re constantly watching other people while other people are watching us.