In search of the good life
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday October 24, 2009
Buddhism helps an award-winning Canadian writer to distinguish right from wrong. THE Canadian writer Marina Endicott and her husband Peter, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, are not morning people. They've learnt, however, to manage and even to benefit from their reluctance to rise. Peter, for example, relies on three alarms, one of which sounds reveille."It's the loudest thing. I just want to kill it every morning," says Endicott by phone from her home in Edmonton, Alberta. She imitates the robust tones of a military bugle so I can better grasp the horror before admitting the alarms are actually a boon for her writing."By the time the third one goes off I'm awake and I'm not great in the morning, so it's often quite a good time to get that subconscious writing done. I don't mean airy-fairy subconscious. I mean writing before your editor kicks in," she says.This commitment to creative freedom through self-discipline is paying off. Endicott's second novel, Good to a Fault, won this year's Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best novel in the Canada and Caribbean division. Christos Tsiolkas won the overall prize with The Slap. "He beat me, the dog," says Endicott, failing to sound bitter. The Australian and the Canadian met in New Zealand during the final judging in May and exchanged not harsh words but recipes. "He gave me his recipe for preserved lemons," Endicott says. "And I'm gonna make 'em." Cooking is one of the few things she claims to enjoy beyond plying her craft."I think writing is nearly all I like to do these days. There is really nothing more engaging than being in the middle of a novel." She is now halfway through her third. It's about three singing sisters touring Canada's vaudeville circuit about the turn of the 20th century, the theatre genre's heyday.Good to a Fault, published here this month, is a more contemporary story. It centres on Clara Purdy €“ 43, single, childless, self-critical and determined to be good €“ who crashes her car into a family who live in theirs. The woman in the other vehicle, Lorraine, turns out to have cancer and in a mad act of generosity and barely sublimated longing for a baby Clara takes Lorraine's family €“ two young children, a baby, their deadbeat dad and his mother €“ into her home while Lorraine undergoes several savage rounds of chemotherapy. If it sounds grim, it's not. It's warm, superbly structured and hard to put down. While Endicott can turn out lyrical sentences, she's been judicious with their planting so forward momentum is never sacrificed to pyrotechnics.Endicott lacks other writerly pretensions, too. She's not coy, for example, about the role her own life experience plays in the story. While she is married with two children, unlike Clara, and has never lived out of a car, unlike Lorraine, Endicott's mother was diagnosed with cancer when Endicott was six and she says Dolly, the nine-year old girl in the book, is based on her childhood self."I was like Dolly. I was wary and aware," she says. "I lived in the mind rather than in the heart as much as I could." And again like Dolly, Endicott was a child who found solace in reading."Books became important to me when my mother got cancer," she says. "I think they totally saved my life, not just once or twice but many times." She recalls that at the time her mother became ill, both her parents spent money they didn't really have on books for her "because they could see that I needed them". Endicott's mother survived the disease "but it was a rough couple of years," she says.If that weren't enough illness for one family, Endicott's sister, Azana, died of cancer at the age of 36 and then, part way through writing Good to a Fault, Endicott was diagnosed with the disease."My husband said that next time I have to write a book about someone who wins a lottery," she says. Treatment, which included a hysterectomy, has been successful and Endicott says she feels "nothing but lucky, having escaped the worst of it, which my sister did not escape ... it was also probably a gift for the book."Endicott has a teenage daughter and "it was really interesting, having started writing the book thinking about Dolly as me and about me watching my mother go through cancer ... to then have that switch, that double vision of seeing what it's like for the mother."Like her main character, Clara Purdy, Endicott is also concerned with doing the right thing, but where Clara has a shaky commitment to the Anglican church, Endicott is exploring Buddhism. "I think I will always be trying to be a Buddhist €“ that may well be a better way to be a Buddhist than by succeeding. I don't know. I am constantly involved in trying to work out what is right and what is good, and constantly discarding what I thought last week or last year ... The only rule I've come up with for myself is that there are no rules. It's a necessary continuance of work and you don't seem to come to a port. It seems to be a continuing sea."Endicott started her working life as an actor, a role she enjoyed but to which she was not ideally suited. "When I was an actor I really loved rehearsals and I did probably among the best cold readings you'd ever hear. But once it was set into performance I got not just bored but almost apathetic. In part it was because the part I was interested in, the discovery part, was finished. So in fact I wasn't that good an actor because I didn't have the endurance for the long run."From acting, Endicott shifted to directing €“ "because I was interested in the thinking process, the working out of how the production would go, the intellectual and emotional exercise" €“ then to being a playwright and dramaturge, and began writing poetry and short stories."I think it was an illusion that I could ever write short stories," she says. "I think there is no question that I am incredibly long-winded." More long-winded than readers of her novels might guess. Endicott usually writes at least twice the number of words that end up being published, creating an entire world from which the book is somehow extracted."The figuring out of what the novel will be within that created world is an interesting puzzle ... once you know what goes on in there you have to figure out what someone who doesn't know that world would need to understand the story. Not everything needs to be in the book."Endicott shares this preference for writing swathes and then paring back to the essentials with one of her writing heroes, the British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, who was renowned for powerful but economical storytelling. Fitzgerald died in 2000."It made me feel good when I found out she wrote that way. It felt legitimate for me to do it," says Endicott. "She wrote the most magnificent books. They were all just perfect little jewels."Endicott also shares with Fitzgerald the need for "a prolonged stretch of solitude and boredom" to be able to write. "I think solitude and boredom in childhood is what makes you into a reader and it's what makes me into a writer now," she says. "Without a certain amount of boredom I don't have the desire to create something unboring."Endicott is fond of an anecdote about Fitzgerald, who claimed that locking herself in the car provided an ideal dose of both solitude and boredom. "Once she'd re-read the owner's manual," says Endicott, "she'd find there was nothing left to do but write."This mysterious process of boring €“ or perhaps it's merely calming €“ the busy, resistant mind into creative submission continues to challenge Endicott. She says she has been known to set aside two weeks at a retreat for writing only to spend the entire first week rifling through the library until, finally, in the second week, she's bored enough to write. "It's a bit of a job for me, getting to that beta-wave state or theta-wave state or whatever, where my monkey mind is finally being quiet and I can start work."Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott is published by Allen & Unwin, $27.99.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald