Ann-Marie MacDonald and her partner, stage director Alisa Palmer, have adopted a baby girl. The Canadian playwright and novelist whose first novel, Fall on Your Knees (1996), earned Oprah's endorsement, can hardly contain her excitement as she speaks with PW in a Toronto cafe.
"This sounds saccharine," she says, "but I look forward to absolutely every day with my daughter. She's a very happy person. So she's just a ton of fun. I look forward to two other things as well... and I have to prepare myself, because if she's not interested, I shouldn't be crushed." MacDonald pauses breathlessly. Her huge brown eyes shoot earnest sparks: "I really want her to want a little pedal car," she says. "And I'm dying for her to want a big, huge train set. Now, if she doesn't want those kinds of things, I'm going to have to realize that that's just my issue."
Pedal cars and trains? PW can't help bursting out laughing. PW was expecting her to make some profound maternal statement about her child's future career choice or character. Then again, Ann-Marie MacDonald tends to make us laugh when we least expect it, even in her writing. Her plays, including Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet), juxtapose and confuse comedy and tragedy. Her latest novel, The Way the Crow Flies, out this fall, features comical eight-year-old Madeleine McCarthy. Madeleine entertains family and friends with a running interpretation of her hero, Bugs Bunny ("Now I've hoid everything, Doc!"), and her amusingly accurate observations. She keeps the reader doubled over with laughter, even while a species of evil slithers into her life. In The Way the Crow Flies, MacDonald makes us laugh until we cry.
As MacDonald approaches the café in Toronto's west end on a day when the late summer sun is so hot it has bleached the sky white, she brings to mind Katharine Hepburn. MacDonald is not so tall, but she holds herself just as erect, her bearing regal and casual. Like Hepburn, she is one of those women who makes menswear look crisp and elegant instead of rumpled as in Annie Hall: MacDonald is dressed in a pale, sleeveless shirt, tailored brown pants. A neat, tweedy bowler sits on her head.
Just like the March children in Little Women—MacDonald reminds us of Hepburn as Jo March in the 1933 version—MacDonald and her siblings used to make up plays. What she really wanted to be was a stand-up comedian: "When I was five, that's what I fantasized about," she says. "I remember going up on a fire escape and telling jokes and hoping that these kids would stay around while I made them laugh. I wanted to do that really badly.
"But then suddenly, at the age of eight, I became an impassioned tragedian and stayed that way. When I got into my 20s, and started acting and creating collectively for theater, I realized that I was writing comedies.
"Yes, I write comedies," she repeats thoughtfully. "Comedies with a tragic undertow."
In The Way the Crow Flies, which was nominated for the 2003 Giller Prize, that dark undertow turns into a tidal wave that eventually crushes the McCarthys and their entire town. The novel opens in 1962 when Wing Comdr. Jack McCarthy, his wife, Mimi, and Mike and Madeleine, their children, are posted to an air force station in Centralia, Ontario. They are pleased to be returning to Canada, the country of their birth, from their posting in Germany. Their first stop is Cape Breton Island, where they visit with Mimi's Acadian family. Afterward, they drive leisurely to Ontario. There, Jack will run the flight training school, and Mimi will be the perfect air force wife, 12-year-old Mike will play baseball and hockey, while Madeleine will join Brownies (the younger affiliate of the Girl Scouts) and figure skate. On the international scene, the Americans are in a race with the Russians to land the first man on the moon. But no one at Centralia doubts the outcome of that competition. Life on the station unfolds as a genuinely happy cliché until Madeleine becomes one of a group of girls to be molested by a teacher. Meanwhile, Jack agrees to secretly assist a Russian defector. But things fall apart, and the collateral damage is high: one child is murdered and a Native American teenager wrongfully imprisoned for the crime. In The Way the Crow Flies, MacDonald explores the link between personal and political responsibility.
Unlike most authors, MacDonald doesn't mind admitting that she often draws upon autobiographical experience. In The Way the Crow Flies, the McCarthys resemble her own air force family. Mimi's Cape Breton relatives are based on MacDonald's actual extended family. The specter of sexual abuse rears up in both of her novels, and one can probably assume that the crime has in some way touched her life. MacDonald also bases the murder in The Way the Crow Flies on an actual case of homicide in central Ontario in which a young man was wrongfully convicted.
MacDonald insists, however, that personal experience is simply a raw ingredient to be stirred into the brew with everything else. She offers her depiction of Madeleine's Brownie troop as one example. "I wasn't a Brownie myself," she says. "But my older sisters were. I was younger than Madeleine then. I remember going to a ceremony called 'flying up.' I remember the disappointment I felt when no one actually flew.
"I remember lots of things about Brownies, and even if I had been one I could not simply rely on my own memory. I mean there would still be my Brownie experience, and then the über-Brownie experience and the meta-Brownie experience. And if I'm going to really speak to people I'm going to have to know all of them. I talked to my sisters about Brownies, even though they remember things completely differently. One sister says the Brownies' fairy slippers were made from crepe paper. Another sister says it was tissue paper. And they were in the same troop!
"I also read a great book with a huge chapter on the Brownies of the late '50s and early '60s," MacDonald continues. "So I do draw on my own memories and experience. But I also tap someone I know who was there, did that. Then I go to the larger source, the book learning."
MacDonald used the same approach in constructing Jack's military environment. "I remembered a lot from the air force stations where we lived, and then I talked to my dad and to old bomber pilots. I also went through private logs. I learned, for instance, that they used red ink for one type of document and blue ink for another."
The Way the Crow Flies runs 720 pages. Still, many journalists ask why MacDonald took so long—six or seven years—to bring out her second book. Well, for one thing, she was in no particular hurry. For another, it does take time to mine one's memories, conduct research and still leave opportunities for alchemy and serendipity: "Alchemy is a great word to use," she says. "Things filter down slowly, like sediment, and eventually you've got gold, you've got a diamond. It is very time consuming. In my experience, what fiction requires more than anything else, is time."
She wrote the novel in three- and six-month intervals, allowing space for serendipity, times to wander into interesting shops or come upon meaningful titles; time to discover "gorgeous fragments of knowledge, which just makes everything so much richer."
MacDonald finds it hard to summon up the patience for the task of writing. "I sit down and it's just like a mountain in front of me. And I might want to climb it in a day, but it's not going to get climbed in a day.... I can want it all I like. It just doesn't work that way."
What MacDonald is tacitly explaining is that she keenly grasps the requirements of her craft. Being gifted is not enough, although MacDonald is preternaturally so. The job calls for commitment to the grind, to slogging away at piecework day after day; to cutting and writing and then cutting again. A large part of MacDonald's success can be attributed to her more than three decades of writing experience.
Born on an RCAF air force station in Baden-Baden, West Germany, in 1958, MacDonald moved with her family to several military bases before settling in Ottawa. Her mother was Catholic and very strict. She forbade her three daughters (MacDonald also has a brother) from wearing jeans or makeup. They were not allowed to date until well into their teens. (MacDonald often jokes that by the time she was allowed to date boys, she was only attracted to girls.) She was an excellent student and in 1977 enrolled at Carleton University to study languages. But her heart was not in it; she longed for an acting career. In time, her parents relented and sent her to Montreal to attend the National Theatre School of Canada. After graduating, the actress, whose plum roles in Canadian films have garnered her a Gemini (Emmy) award and a Genie (Oscar) nomination, began collaborating on plays and embarking on solo projects. By the time she came to the attention of Louise Dennys, a prominent editor at Knopf Canada, MacDonald was more than ready. In 1995, Dennys was developing a campaign to promote four exceptional first-time novelists. She called it the First Face of Fiction. Her choices proved prescient, featuring not only MacDonald but also Yann Martel, recipient of the 2002 Booker Prize.
MacDonald is fast becoming Canada's literary darling, a status reinforced weekly by her role as host of CBC's biography show, Life and Times. On television she exudes a girl-next-door prettiness, a presence as warm and comforting as hot cereal on an icy morning. Her acceptance has been so complete that hardly anyone remembers her subversive roots. In fact, this summer MacDonald and Palmer were among the first lesbian couples to take advantage of the new law legalizing same-sex marriages. Much more radical, at least in writing circles, MacDonald continues to be the rare Canadian woman novelist comfortable enough to mix politics and literature. In The Way the Crow Flies she probes Canada's political past, in addition to the country's international role and responsibility. Her novels question the sincerity of Canadian beliefs about diversity and multiculturalism. MacDonald stretches the hackneyed feminist adage, the personal is political. She wants us to accept that the political is the personal, as well.
"I think I'm the kind of person who grew up making those connections," she says. "Partly because wherever we lived we were always the outsiders. We didn't look like outsiders. But we were. And this sense of belonging and not belonging at the same time is truly the observer's post. Also I'm lesbian, part of an invisible minority. To the outside world, I look just like that straight girl next door. I know what it's like to pass."
"Maybe I'm a missionary from the other side to the mainstream," she says. "Part of my conscious ethos has been not to water anything down, but to invite the greatest possible range of people into an experience that they might think they are not open to.
"It's like what Doctor Seuss writes in Green Eggs and Ham: 'Try it/ Try it/ And you'll see.' "
