Last Wednesday, I taped a Proust’s Questionnaire segment for Shelagh Rogers’ CBC show “The Next Chapter”. The Proust Questionnaire is designed to elicit revealing truths by firing a series of random questions at the subject, in this case, me. I wasn’t given time to ponder. I simply had to answer. I had fun with the questionnaire, and I also learned something that has led me, at long last, to start a blog.
One of the Proust questions was “What quality do you admire most in a person?” I answered that I most admired people who had the ability to create and respect a shared history with others. If you’re lucky, life is long. At times, it can also be lonely, but friends with whom you share a history lighten the load, put into context events that seem catastrophic, remind you that you’ve been unhappy before and have not only survived but blossomed.
My longest standing friendship is with Joan, a woman at whose third birthday party I threw up because of a deadly combination of excitement, cake, and wearing a frilly dress. I was two; Joan was three. 65 years later we are still friends.
On Monday, February 1, 2010, the day this will be posted, I’ll celebrate the birthday of my friend Ashley, the publicist at M&S who has just moved into her first new home with her partner and their handsome young son. The handsome young son’s colour of choice for the interior of the new digs is red. Sam is a much-loved child and I’m keen to see how his parents accommodate Sam’s design wishes for his new accommodations.
Not counting family members, there are perhaps 20 other people with whom I correspond on a regular basis. Without their presence in my life, great chunks of my life would go unremarked upon and unremembered. I think my friends would miss my presence in their lives, too.
Enough throat clearing. It’s time to get to the point. Yesterday I began the 13th novel in the Joanne Kilbourn series, and I thought some of you might be interested in seeing how the process works.
“Deadly Appearances,” the first Joanne Kilbourn novel appeared in 1990. “The Nesting Dolls” the 12th in the series, will be published this August. Over the past 20 years, you have written to me, sent me criticisms (gentle and pointed); accepted my offer of signed books in exchange for the bags of wheat seed that allowed our family to continue our tradition of growing wheat for Easter after my son and his girlfriend (whose dad had generously supplied our wheat for years) broke up. A reader in Tasmania has sent me CD’s of Tord Gustavson and Erik Satie; another reader sent me a marzipan pig for good luck at Christmas. I treasure a book about the Northern Saints of England, sent by a reader who came to dinner at our home in Regina. Peter had grown up in the house in which we now live and he wanted to show the house to his wife, Claire, talk books with my husband and me, and trade stories with our younger son Nathaniel about short cuts to the school they both attended. It was a lovely evening, full of laughter and memories. Six months later, Peter was murdered by robbers in Yemen. His behaviour during the attack was, by accounts in the Globe and Mail, heroic.
None of these stories would have come my way if people who liked the Joanne Kilbourn series hadn’t written to me. I always respond to mail, but until now I’ve never initiated a correspondence. This blog is a beginning.
No one can guarantee how anything will come out. My thoughts now are that I don’t want this blog to be airbrushed – an account of a perfect life where every day of my professional life is a triumph and every personal day is burnished by the sheen of self-satisfaction.
I will be honest. If I have a rotten day, I won’t force you to wallow in my misery but I will acknowledge that I’m ready to snap hub-caps. My family and friends are such a huge part of my life that you’ll hear about them, but I will never violate their privacy. They are far too dear to me to become material. That’s it.
And so we begin...