Six Weeks To Toxic

I never write auto-biographically, that just doesn’t interest me. But everyone that I write about is in some way me, in the same way that everyone you dream about is supposedly your subconscious’s idea of a good symbol for yourself. It sounds more narcissistic than it is in practice. The ironic (and harrowing) thing about writing fiction is that at every given point I strive to tell the exact and shameless truth—what I honestly, wholeheartedly feel my characters would say, do or think. If I was writing one of those damn memoirs that are so bloody popular nowadays, trust me, I would be fudging the whole way.

SWTT Cover

Six Weeks to Toxic is about the last six weeks in a sixteen year friendship. When I was in my mid-thirties, I had a close friend who liked to chat to me at least once a day. As soon as she got married, she pretty well disappeared; I rarely heard from her. Theoretically, I’m supposed to have been miffed. But I was more fascinated than anything else. I realized that modern women’s friendships sustain themselves intensely for much longer than they used to, now that we postpone marriage ad nauseam. When a friendship goes, a lot goes with it.

Admittedly, I wanted to write about two close friends, one of who gets married. But I decided that the friend who’d get hitched wouldn’t be the one the reader expected to do so from the get-go. Then I realized that was going to ruin the friendship. That got me really excited. Although most of us have endured at least one friendship-gone-to-hell in our time we don’t get to discuss that nearly as openly as the demise of our romances. Sure we can try, but we’re probably not going to get the same kind of unadulterated sympathy we score when a man does us wrong.

Is my book chick lit? I prefer to think chick literary. My characters love language as much as I do, more importantly language posed within a thematic framework. Bess, my heroine draws upon a whole range of references, from Burberry to Baudelaire, like any chick who’s majored in the humanities. Incidentally, I have a big soft spot for my bad girl, Maxi. I think she’s generous in her own way, poor thing. People have been hard on Maxi but they forget that the whole story is told from Bess’s point of view. Perhaps I’ll write use Maxi as a narrator when she turns forty-five and her moral strengths become more apparent.

My new book is called The Catch, about a Toronto based television producer who falls in love with a fisherman. It’s set in Prince Edward Island, the home of Anne of Green Gables. Hence I’m unofficially referring to it as Anne of Green Gables with Sex. Actresses always complain about sex scenes but I love them. Must go write a sex scene, thank you for your time …

You can purchase Six Weeks to Toxic at: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indigo (Canada), and McNally Robinson.