ABOVE: Watch Ann-Marie MacDonald talk about Adult Onset on Global Toronto’s The Morning Show.
TORONTO — How does Ann-Marie MacDonald write a novel based on her life that doesn’t necessarily shine a favourable light on her parents?
“You’ve got to write like they’re dead,” she said Thursday, during an appearance on Global Toronto’s The Morning Show.
“If you love them, write like they’re dead and tell the truth.”
In Adult Onset, MacDonald tells the story of Mary Rose MacKinnon, a successful author raising two young children with her partner Hilary, a busy theatre director. Increasingly frustrated by the demands of her life, Mary Rose begins to revisit her childhood and the less-than-perfect relationship with her parents.
The characters mirror MacDonald and her real-life partner, theatre director Alisa Palmer, with whom she has two children.
“I know what it’s like to be home with two toddlers, full-time, alone and I know how isolating that can be,” said MacDonald, 55. “I also understand now that if you have anything unprocessed from your own past — if you haven’t dealt with aspects of your personal back story, your children will find them. Children are heat-seeking and it will all pop up.”
MacDonald’s personal back story includes parents who reacted badly to her coming out as a lesbian many decades ago.
“It was extremely problematic and I was essentially exiled by my parents. It was very, very hard,” she recalled. “It was my mother. I got the Old World curses on my head. Big time.”
MacDonald said her parents found a way to provide love and support as the years went on but the pain of being exiled for simply sharing her truth never fully healed.
“When I had my own children I was kind of in the other role. I was the powerful one. I was capable of exiling them with my anger,” she said. “And that’s when I stopped short and I thought, ‘I have to look at this. I think I still have an injury, really.’
“Forgiveness is not pretty. You cannot forgive what you do not remember and remembering can feel more like hatred and anger when you’re in the middle of it. It takes a lot of love to get through the part where you’re remembering injuries and you’re remembering your own part in something negative.”
MacDonald said writing Adult Onset meant writing about her parents.
“My job as an artist is to go into those darker places and to illuminate them and to use whatever I can, in terms of my personal point of view, to render it universal, to transform it into fiction,” she explained.
MacDonald, whose previous works include Fall on Your Knees and the Giller-nominated The Way the Crow Flies, said she only asked for her parents’ blessing after giving herself permission.
“When I was writing this book I thought, ‘how can I do this? This is terrible,” she recalled. “But that’s what a lot of writers go through. It’s an exalted form of procrastination — ‘I better not write because I’m going to hurt someone’s feelings.’ You’ve got to have the stamina and the courage.”
MacDonald said she recently gave her parents a copy of the book. Have they read it?
“Not yet,” she replied.
“They’ll probably read it. They read everything I do. They’re proud. They’re my parents. They love me.”
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