Madeleine Thien and Heather O’Neill are two of Canada’s most beloved authors of their generation. In a piece commissioned by carte blanche, the two award-winning writers discuss a wide range of topics, from being private people in a world that worships personality to backgrounds and the influences on their work. This email exchange spanned a number of weeks this fall.
I. My first drink is an accident, one-note purple, too sweet to be dangerous. Cloying enough to make adults wince and draw children like hummingbirds to nectar. A tiny bitterness, [More…]
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The wild strawberry flush across my chest, her cheeks. An illicit kiss in her basement suite.
Five years in, we start counting: two eggs bled away casually every month.
Then, six months of flirting, negotiations. Two hopeful women. A captivated man.
Cosmopolitans. Our red leather couch under mistletoe and holly berries. Jazzberry cartoon hearts radiate around all of us.
“Please don’t break our hearts,” I say.
“I won’t.” His scarlet cape promise. The last time we see him. Read more →
The first thing I saw when I woke up was the row of ancient bibles in a corner bookshelf. The flat light of an overcast dawn confused my sense of time, though. Hadn’t my friends and I just gone to bed? Then I saw a short, round-faced man standing over me, wearing a porkpie hat exactly like Gene Hackman would wear in The French Connection a few years later. The man pointed a short-barrelled revolver at the centre of my forehead. I remember noting how perfectly circular the muzzle was and that its bluing was very deep. I saw the soft grey domes of the bullets in the cylinder and noted the thickness of the front site. Then I looked away from the revolver to glance at the film can holding a jumble of foil-wrapped drugs on the floor beside my bed.
“Move,” the little man said, smiling. “I dare you.” Read more →
Oh Margaret, lost in the parking garage. She couldn’t remember where she’d left the car, though I bet she was putting on. With her, I couldn’t ever tell.
“I swear it was the second floor,” she said, walking through the aisle of cars. She held her hand high above her head, waved it back and forth, pressing the remote lock for her new Lexus. It looked like she was trying to hail an invisible cab. I was following her.
She’d driven down to Cincinnati from Columbus, arrived an hour late. She cursed and blamed the traffic as she landed on a barstool beside me at Arnold’s Downtown. She still looked great in a floral summer dress hanging right down her tall frame and that same platinum blonde hair, cut shorter than ever but refusing to show a single root. She had new knee-high vintage leather boots that she bragged about finding at some hole-in-the-wall secondhand store in Northside. But she looked older now too, as if moving to the Rust Belt had slowed her down, allowed her age to finally catch up. Read more →
One night I have what I can only describe as a dream, though it feels like an altered state somewhere between sleeping and waking. I’m in my room with the blue walls and someone is standing at the foot of my bed. I try to sit up, but my body is as heavy as a dead thing. When I finally struggle free and come to consciousness, the room is empty. I get up and check my door. It’s still locked. This becomes the first of many dreams like this. Read more →