A 19-Year-Old’s Referendum: An Interview with Heather O’Neill

Heather O’Neill is the author of The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, which was published to rave reviews. Her first novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, was the winner of CBC’s Canada Reads and the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. It was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Orange Prize. O’Neill is a regular contributor to CBC Books, CBC Radio, This American Life, The New York Times Magazine, The Gazette, and The Walrus. She was born in Montreal, where she currently lives.

I met Heather O’Neill and her publicist in the lobby of the Holiday Inn on Carlton Street in Toronto. It was early May, and O’Neill was in the city to talk on the panel “What Women Write” at the Pages Unbound Festival.

O’Neill is the author of two novels, Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night. In April, HarperCollins released Daydreams of Angels, a collection of short stories about fairy tales and the weird magic of childhood in the city. She lives in Montreal, as she has for most of her life, and the city is central to her fiction. The Girl Who Was Saturday Night takes place in the mid-1990s, during the lead up to the sovereignty referendum on October 30, 1995.

O’Neill said that she wanted to write about the broke aristocracy of fin-de-siècle Montreal. Nouschka and Nicolas Tremblay play the prince and princess of the Latin Quarter. They are the two children of Étienne Tremblay, a washed up ’70s chansonnier in the manner of Gilles Vigneault and Robert Charlebois. They live with their hoarding grandfather and go out every night to dive bars and ethnic social clubs. Around them, economic stagnation has made downtown Montreal a kingdom of petty criminals, clowns, grand parleurs, and alley cats. Crossing Mont-Royal to visit the Cimitière-des-Neiges, Nouschka Tremblay remarks:

There was a man on a unicycle balancing a hat on his nose. After the 1980 referendum, everyone with prospects left the city. Everyone here now was a direct descendent of a daydreamer. A disproportionate amount of people in the city were planning careers in the circus.

Nouschka presides over this court of losers and bon vivants: an ermine-trimmed, blue-Adidas-wearing pageant queen of the St-Jean-Baptiste Parade. Everyone falls in love with her, everyone tells her that they adored watching her on TV every Christmas. Middle-class Montrealers can’t imagine her poverty. Among her neighbours, she is still royalty. She was on television, and everyone knows the lyrics to her father’s songs. The Tremblays live in a city where saints and magic still reside, even if Lucien Bouchard is one of those saints. Loulou, Nouschka’s grandfather, tells stories of skinny little dragons poking around the dumpsters in Chinatown. Nicolas, her brother, suggests that Quebec should separate from the planet and orbit around Jupiter, so that no one in the world would ever hear another word of Québécois French again, and they could speak to each other in peace.

“Nouschka presides over this court of losers and bon vivants: an ermine-trimmed, blue-Adidas-wearing pageant queen of the St-Jean-Baptiste Parade.”

Magic belongs to the demimonde. It carries them through bank robberies, glows out of the light bulbs on the Metropolis marquee, and enchants the streets where they live.

I interviewed O’Neill for “À la prochaine fois” because of The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, but mostly we talked about Montreal, fairy tales, and Quebec history from the point of view of a 19-year-old girl.

Jason Freure: Daydreams of Angels is your first collection of short stories, and much of it is about fairy tales, magic, and androids. Were you ever drawn to fantasy or science fiction, either as a writer or a reader?

Heather O’Neill: I have been, yeah. I’m interested in speculative fiction. On a line level, I’ve always been interested in metaphor. Science fiction or speculative fiction allows you to use the entire text as a metaphor. I’m at the beginning of something now that’s kind of science fiction, that’s an exploration of gender. It’s like having beings from other worlds.

JF: Since we’re on the topic of gender already, I wanted to ask you about your book covers. Carrey Dunne wrote a piece last year about the ways books written by women are marketed. Her article is specifically about how publishers “tart up” books. Do you feel like this has ever happened to any of your books? If not, is there anything you would change about their design or their marketing?

HO: Lullabies for Little Criminals definitely had a sort of Henry Darger feeling. I think it was playing with the old images of girls on traditional books. Seeing it in that ironic way, I didn’t in any way feel like that had been “tarted up.” The second one, Girl Who Was Saturday Night, is just black with lights on. That one wasn’t tarted up at all. But you know, I like that. My female characters are always brash and they have a strong independent streak. Maybe they’re dictating the covers.

JF: You’re a Montreal native, and it’s the place you write about most often. Do you feel like being from a city in that way gives you a different kind of authority, or at least a different perspective on writing about a place, than a transplant?

HO: I do feel like I can make things up, twist things around. I probably wouldn’t feel that if I hadn’t spent the vast majority of my life on the island. It does give me a sense of feeling like there’s nobody who knows it better than I do. I switch the streets around. If I was reading someone from Toronto who’d been there while they were at McGill, and they switched the streets around, I’d say, “No.” But for me I feel like that’s okay. I just feel like the city somehow belongs to me.

JF: Daydreams of Angels moves out of the Latin Quarter and the Plateau that you so often write about to other neighbourhoods of Montreal. Do you see your work continuing to take place in new parts of town or out of Montreal altogether?

HO: Yeah. The first and second novel are set across the street from each other. Moving to other neighbourhoods and even overseas in the short story collection gave me a new sense of confidence. I did have a sense of specificity as a writer and maybe I was afraid to leave my little geographical nexus. It was liberating to be able to leave it.

JF: You placed some of the stories in Daydreams in Occupied France. Was there a particular draw to the place and time for you?

HO: What are the places anyone draws narratives from? Some of them are obviously from parents and grandparents, and I had heard a lot of stories when I was a kid about what had happened overseas during World War II. I incorporated that soldier lore into the book. I had uncles who had gone overseas during that time and it was something I wanted to have in the novel. Someone who was about my age would have grown up with that narrative.

JF: Now I want to get into Saturday Night. That novel is really involved with Quebec’s history. Whenever history comes up, Nouschka always has her own imaginative spin. She talks about how love in Quebec was cursed by Samuel de Champlain’s wife. Did you always want to give history this magical element? Where did that come into the novel?

HO: It’s the way Nouschka understands the world. I wanted it to sound like the way a 19-year-old understands history, where she only remembers the catchy bits. When you grow up in Quebec you have a zillion history classes, and all anyone remembers about Champlain in high school is, “What! He’s dating a twelve-year-old?” I just highlighted the things that would attract a storyteller about Quebec history. It’s a completely uninformed history of Quebec, with only the oddball elements, and all the rest, all the statistics, thrown out.

JF: What was the 1995 referendum like for you? What was it like in Montreal at the time?

HO: It’s funny because I was around Nouschka’s age. You know, at that age you’re so egocentric it’s hard no matter what to focus on what’s happening in the world. Your life is just so much more important. One minute you’re sort of aware that the referendum’s happening and the province might separate, but really you’re more involved with your love life. I wanted the referendum to be like how it would affect a 19-year-old. I love that. I was translating it: this huge thing is happening but it’s sort of not. In a 19-year-old’s consciousness, you’re totally involved one minute and suddenly you switch the channel when someone you know walks down the street or into the club.

JF: I was going to phrase this question two ways: what do you think about Pierre-Karl Péladeau and the odds of a referendum in the future, or what would Noushcka think of the politics in Quebec today?

HO: I don’t know. I’m not a great person to ask. Nouschka would be a more interesting person to ask. I wonder what she would be like now.

JF: It seemed like she grew up with separatism. It is in her family, but by the end of the novel she is moving away from it a little, or at least thinking about it for herself.

HO: You have an idea that she’s going to be a writer, or that’s what she’s interested in. When I was writing, I could either see her going into writing or going into politics. Her family has an oratory bent. It’s their one gift. They fail at everything else, but they’re just able to command a room when they speak, which is obviously like Lucien Bouchards’s gift. I don’t know. I don’t even think I could speak for Nouschka. It’s such a delicate thing. Would Nouschka still be a sovereignist?

JF: There are a couple classics of Quebec literature that get mentioned in Saturday Night, like Le Matou and Bonheur d’occasion. They’re both about poverty and not being able to pay the rent in Montreal. Do you see your books as belonging to a kind of Québécois tradition of urban fiction?

HO: I mean, it’s funny because when I think of the huge influences on me from Quebec literature, it’s all the francophone stuff. I remember discovering Marie-Claire Blais and A Season in the Life of Emmanuel. She was writing about poverty and families living in cramped quarters, but also describing it with this sense of grace. And I read Gabrielle Roy and Michel Tremblay growing up. I think I’m writing in that tradition more than the anglo-tradition, like Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen.

JF: In other interviews you’ve been asked about the Atwood-Munro-Ondaatje trifecta in the Rest of Canada. You might have more to do with French Quebec than English Canada.

HO: Someone was telling me that in the Rest of Canada, they didn’t necessarily read Canadian classics in school. In Quebec, when we’re in French immersion or French class, we all read heaps of Quebec novels. In that way we had this wonderful sense of what was being written at the time and in this culture.

JF: I think the only Canadian book I read in high school was Fifth Business.

HO: In French we were reading all of Gabrielle Roy. I read Bonheur d’occasion, but also Rue Deschambault, and Anne Hébert. We read all sorts of stuff.

JF: Lullabies has this post-linguistic element to it. It’s never really clear what language anyone is speaking and it doesn’t seem to matter all that much. However, language divisions are much more sharply drawn in Saturday Night. Was that a symptom of its more political subject matter?

HO: In Lullabies language just didn’t matter. I’m finishing this new novel and I’ve also gone with it not mattering. They kind of intersect. When I was writing Noushcka and Nicolas, I started out conscious that they were francophones. When I was first visualizing them, I was seeing them in this Nouvelle Vague tradition from France. I wanted them to be that kind of gangster-running-around-on-the-street, but not really. They look like little kids in those films in their dapper suits while they’re reciting philosophy. So I made them francophone. Then I wanted everybody to know who they were.

“I thought, ‘Obviously, they’re going to be separatists.’ How could they not be? It was almost like they insisted on that.”

When they’re 19, everybody thinks they’re famous, but in a novel you have to have concrete things to show what you mean. You can’t just catch that existential feeling without a plot. I made it so their dad had been famous. I liked those old chansonniers when I was a kid. We had the records. They were so odd and over the top—they couldn’t actually sing but they would just scream out. So I had that, and then they were francophone and they lived during that time period. I thought, “Obviously, they’re going to be separatists.” How could they not be? It was almost like they insisted on that.

JF: It grew out of something you were already working on.

HO: It’s not like I thought I was going to write a book about a whole family of separatists. It just became inevitable. If I was going to write these francophones with their background and in that part of town, they would be sovereignists.

JF: When the Scottish referendum was going on, Ken Dryden wrote in The Toronto Star, “In every referendum, Yes has poetry on its side. No is stuck with numbers and threat and deadening prose.”

HO: Exactly, because the Yes side is a possible future. What can you wax poetic on but possibilities? But No says you have to “get back to facts.” That’s what the Yes side can always react against, too. “You don’t put a monetary value on our identity.”

JF: You kind of touched on this already, but at the end of Saturday Night, Adam, a wealthy kid from Westmount, comes back to find Nouschka. He’s not slumming it any more. He’s got his life together. How do you think politics fit into romantic or familial relationships?

HO: In life in general or in this book?

JF: Either. Start with the book.

HO: As far as Noushcka and Adam’s relationship, the two of them going together is just a denouement to the book. Let’s just figure this all out now since we’re stuck here together. At the character level, that was just a resonance that their relationship was inevitably going to have on its own. I saw the two of them as being aristocrats from different parts of town. Nouschka is like the princess of her world. Everybody knows her. She’s the one to date. I wanted Nouschka and Nicolas to have that old school, Edwardian aristocrat quality. Then Adam is an aristocrat from Westmount. The two of them had completely different backgrounds, but Adam, who has been to all these private schools, is her only intellectual match. Even though Nouschka is a high school dropout, she’s been educated in a different way.

“I wanted Nouschka and Nicolas to have that old school, Edwardian aristocrat quality.”

She and Adam are both intellectually seeking something different. I’m interested in how people can be equally brilliant when they’ve come to what they know in completely different ways.

JF: You said that Nouschka’s understanding of history is a 19-year-old’s, with just the highlights. In Nouschka’s commentary on Quebec history, she often approaches it through female figures. For example, in the first couple of pages, Nouschka claims that the Québécois accent comes from the filles du roi, who didn’t want to come to Quebec or have babies, so they spoke to their children through gritted teeth. In general, was that a narrative that you found missing when you wrote Saturday Night?

HO: The narrative of women?

JF: The narrative of women in Quebec history.

HO: When did women get the vote in Quebec?

JF: I think it was very late. [Editor’s Note: Women voted in a general provincial election in Quebec for the first time in 1944].

HO: The position of women in Quebec history is so appalling. I start the book off strong. I had a Quebec historian read the book to see if anything rankled her, to see if anything was false, and she liked that first moment. It just speaks to the condition of women in Quebec for so long, and what they went through, that repressed silence and non-existence. You don’t even have to look far for the female characters. Women are always there. People try to erase them.

JF: It was only a few years ago they recognized Jeanne Mance as a co-founder of Montreal.

HO: I just got my Canadian passport and I was flipping the pages. I was like, “There better be a woman, fast.” I’m conscious of it. It’s just a way that I read fiction, or even history. Even if there’s a woman in a footnote, I go, “Hey! I found you! Come on out.”

JF: You write so often about real places, about Montreal, but when you go into rural Quebec you invent towns like Val-des-Loups and Pas-Grand-Chose. What’s behind that? Why not just pick the name of a place, and say it happened here?

HO: When I first started with Lullabies, Val-des-Loups had been an actual place. Then it became so much larger than the place that I didn’t want to insult anybody in any little town. I mean, just on a personal level, my dad’s girlfriend was francophone and they had this horrible relationship where they just fought like cats and dogs. You know, when you’re a little kid and you’re subjected to one of these relationships, it’s hell. We would go out to the country together. Her family lived outside of Montreal. We’d go and they’d always fight, and then we’d stop the car in the middle of nowhere and they would just scream and yell at each other. As a little kid, that’s where I got this horror of leaving the island.

There’s always a fight. And we were always going to see this strange relative, like the step-mother’s relatives who actually don’t like you. Of course they never wanted her dating my dad in the first place. He’s got these three bummy little kids. I think that’s in my head, though. It’s completely unfair.

People often say, “Oh, rural Quebec is so wonderful.” I know, but this is all my personal mythology. I gave it a fake name. I mean, Montreal probably deserves a fake name, too. Sainte-Heather Island. I’m talking about it so negatively and it’s seen through the eyes of characters who want to be back on the island. In the first two novels my characters are so wrapped up in their contexts and trying to save their little worlds, though they’re actually worlds that they shouldn’t be trying to save. The idea of being off the island is just traumatic for them. The Tremblays refuse to leave the island. They will literally only be dragged off in chains by the cops.

JF: Nicolas says he will lose all of his magical powers if he crosses the bridge. It does have an insular feel.

HO: I think Montreal has.

JF: Maybe it’s just the geography. There’s a more defined border for leaving it than other cities. You have to cross bridges, rather than just watching it fade away into the countryside.

HO: I guess so, but you could probably forget you’re on an island. It’s not like we go over so great an amount of water. However, there is a sense in Montreal that it is a sort of mecca. It’s like the end point of the province is Montreal. You feel when you’re in there that it’s the most exciting place in the province. I don’t know, you know how Montrealers are.

JF: On the LitPOP blog, you were recently talking about how the Latin Quarter you write about doesn’t really exist anymore. What’s changed?

HO: It’s just literally been razed to the ground. They’re extending the Quartier des Spectacles. They were knocking down those buildings so they can expand that area.

JF: What about St-Louis Square? In Lullabies it seems like a good place to pick up heroin.

HO: That part is so different now. I just passed through it the other day. Because of its proximity to Berri, there are still sketchy elements. The trouble that I have is that I’m always describing places where I spent my childhood. When I was talking about authority, it’s like, the place you spent your childhood is always going to be described differently by someone who didn’t spend their childhood there. You’ve seen places from a child’s eyes. You’re able to describe it in different ways. Kids are really good at categorizing things and seeing peculiar identities. The older we get, everything just seems as it is. We’re not as good at categorizing. We get more intelligent and realize that everything is similar, but when you’re little, this is this and that is that. Anyways, when I describe places where I spent a lot of time as a kid, it’s totally through rose-coloured glasses. I could be completely wrong.

“ ... the place you spent your childhood is always going to be described differently by someone who didn’t spend their childhood there.”

However, in the old days you’d go to St-Louis Square and it would just be filled with people. There were puppet shows and people playing instruments. I remember once going as a kid and there being this woman who looked like an Edith Piaf type. She was with this black accordion player, and they kept playing three or four bars of a song before they stopped and just yelled at each other that they’d gotten it wrong. I was just a little kid watching it and for the few seconds they would play, it was just so good. I would just wish that they wouldn’t start fighting. The square was more alive. There were more drug dealers. It seemed to be compartmentalized. There was a playground in there too, a place for kids, and then the place by the statue was for the really seedy element. That’s where all the heroin dealers were, and where as a kid I never actually went. What’s the name of that sculpture?

JF: I can’t remember exactly. [Editor’s Note: The sculpture is the Cremazie monument, featuring a fallen soldier with the quote, “Pour mon drapeau je viens ici mourir.”]

HO: Around there. That corner was too wild. There would be puppet shows and performances up at the front. Kids were around the street back then, as they were everywhere. They’ve all been taken inside.

JF: They’re not really allowed to roam around free anymore.

HO: Prince Arthur is also falling into complete despair. Everything is closing. It used to be so vibrant with all the street performers and stuff.

JF: Prince Arthur really precipitously turned into a ghost street.

HO: Now it seems like everything is the big, grand spectacle. They have all this beautiful stuff throughout the city. There used to be that bohemian feel of passing somebody standing on a chair or reciting their poetry. That seems to have gone.

I can’t even remember if some of these things are true. I remember going to Old Montreal and there was a guy with a tiger on a leash. It’s such a clear memory and you could take a picture with the tiger. I guess it probably existed. Things like that happened in the ’80s. Then part of me thinks, “Did I just dream that?” That’s the difference with a place where you spent your childhood. You don’t even know what’s imaginary and what’s real. It has a sense of being a fictionalized place already.

JF: I have these issues of Fish Piss, Louis Rastelli’s zine from the ’90s, with some of your poems in them. How did you start contributing to Fish Piss?

HO: Oh my god. I’m trying to remember. I think at the very beginning it was just some photocopied poems. I think I was even in that one. Pre-first Fish Piss. I have no memory of when I first met Louis. I know he had asked me to include something. At that point I was making my own chapbooks. He said, “I’m making this collective and asking other people to do stuff.” And then he told us, “If you guys want this to happen, you certainly have to come over and help me staple these things.” We all had to do our staple duty.

JF: Did you know some of the other writers and artists who were publishing in Fish Piss?

HO: We all kind of knew each other. That was pre-Internet, so we all knew each other from the Plateau scene. You would do these weird variety shows. Rick Trembles would show up with a slide show. He would dress up in drag and explain point by point what made him masturbate and how he masturbated. Then there would be this guy named Corpus who would just get on the floor with his microphone. He would scream one line at his mother through the whole thing. I would go up with my poems and read them and then Rufus Wainwright would go up and play guitar. It was just the Plateau thing, a coffee house kind of culture. I think I knew almost everybody in Fish Piss.

JF: In an interview you did for Canadian Literature, you were asked if there was something special going on in Montreal, like a literary revival. You said that the writers there didn’t really know each other.

HO: Did I say that?

JF: Something like that. “Do you know other Montreal writers?” You answered that everyone was busy typing away on their own.

HO: I mean, I was so young. It was inevitable. Young people know each other. Everybody needs a coterie when they’re young. You have to have someone to give your work to for feedback and you need to see what they’re doing. Young people naturally gravitate towards that. When you get a little bit older you can actually leave the coterie, after you’ve all tried to murder each other.