Fawn Parker blends her own grief with fiction in her novel Hi, It's Me
Hi, It's Me is a finalist for the 2024 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
Fawn Parker is a novelist and poet whose writing often dives head first into complex emotions surrounding loss.
Her latest novel is Hi, It's Me, which follows a woman named Fawn on the day her mother dies. Hi, It's Me centres around her disorienting personal experience of grief while also exploring power dynamics, the patriarchy and shame.
"There's a lot of stuff in here that really resonated, having also lost a parent at a relatively young age," said Mattea Roach on Bookends.
Parker is a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick and the poet laureate of Fredericton. Her other books include the novel What We Both Know and her poetry collection Soft Inheritance, which reflected on her mother's cancer diagnosis.
Hi, It's Me is a work of fiction, but there are a lot of parallels between the main character and Parker herself. The novel is a finalist for this year's Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
She joined Roach to discuss how writing Hi, It's Me was part of the process of grieving her mother.
Mattea Roach: When did the idea for transforming your personal experience into a book come to you and why did you want to write a novel like this?
Fawn Parker: I was at this point that I often arrive at as a novelist, where I had no next idea, which for me is very stressful. I like to be working on a manuscript at all times. I had this archive of my mother's handwriting, grocery lists, her diary … and it felt like something I really wanted to do something with. I at least didn't want to get rid of it.
The book felt like a way to use it and then let it go rather than just throwing it out and feeling like it had gotten lost in time.
So I started to draw on her archive as a way of building plot around who she was, who I felt she was, who I felt she was after reading all of that, and what it meant ethically that I read all of her journals and looked through all of her diaries. And then that's where this book spiraled out of.
MR: How much of this book is real and memoir-like and how much of it is creative license?
FP: I like to think of it as an emotional memoir or emotional autobiography. What's shown in Hi, It's Me is how I felt grieving in the early days. That's sort of the surreal, overwhelming feeling of the day that she died. But those events are fictional.
The characters other than myself and my mother are made-up. It was a way of blending those things and seeing how they interacted throughout the course of this fictional day, using my memories, my feelings, things that I maybe did or said that day, but to people I didn't say them to.
I found that really creatively stimulating.
MR: At the time she dies, Fawn's mom is sharing a home with four other women. They live by this really strict set of rules, including one that they don't speak to men at all or have any engagement with the men in their community. Why did you want to write about this lifestyle?
FP: That was something that I always struggled with in my relationship with my real mother and her circle of female friends. Our feminism was just a shade off or maybe many shades off from one another.
I wanted to highlight Fawn's discomfort between worlds in that way.- Fawn Parker
But she was so empowered and strong and I wanted to support her in the journey that I saw her take, which was one of strength.
But she also stood for things that were not nuanced enough for us to come to agreement a lot of the time. So this was my way of dramatizing that friction of like, "I love that these women have found this life, but they're just not quite there in terms of what we're actually fighting for as an oppressed gender, moving past two genders.
I think they just feel a bit lost in time." So I wanted to highlight Fawn's discomfort between worlds in that way.
MR: I was wondering what your relationship to womanhood is and how that's maybe influenced you as a writer and perhaps your choice of subject matter or style.
FP: I've always had a very complicated relationship to it that has not gotten any more clear. I use fiction in a big way to explore that and what it means and why I have this imposter syndrome with womanhood, which has been relieved by the fact that we're sort of expanding and broadening what that can mean for anybody.
But my mother and I shared this feeling of 'not quite' in whatever direction we were, we just weren't quite something. I found her, in a way, a helpful mentor in just existing between spaces.
But she definitely fought against femininity a lot of the time.
MR: I hate to be like, how did writing the book shape your healing? Because maybe you're not healed, maybe it's not over, but what do you think about all that?
FP: I do think it's over in the sense that when I finished the book, it felt finished. And now I don't spend every day thinking about my mom. She'll never not be the mother that I lost. But I do think there was a bit of a closing feeling and I have the book to thank for that.
I do feel like I let go of a lot of it.- Fawn Parker
Last fall, I talked to Tom Power, who's somewhere in this building, about objects and hoarding things that a dead person leaves behind.
That was a huge thing for me — not wanting to let anything go. I had gum wrappers and it was just very messed up. But I had to move through all those stages rather than those classic seven stages of grief.
I had my own stages of hoarding and drinking. I guess stage seven was finishing the book. I do feel like I let go of a lot of it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Liv Pasquarelli.
