Heather O'Neill explores gender, power and complicated relationships in her new novel When We Lost Our Heads
CBC Radio | Posted: February 4, 2022 7:32 PM | Last Updated: February 4, 2022
Heather O'Neill's new novel When We Lost Our Heads is all about women breaking rules. Some of them are even planning a revolution.
At the centre of the story are two extraordinary young women — Marie Antoine and Sadie Arnett — 19th century aristocrats living in Montreal's wealthiest neighbourhood, the Golden Mile.
Marie is the spoiled daughter of the richest man in the city, and Sadie is the unloved daughter of a politician and his wife. They meet at the age of 12, and they're like magnets. They attract and repel each other from the beginning. They're daring, they take risks. But when a childhood game turns deadly, they're forced to end their friendship.
When they do reunite, the intensity of their relationship threatens to destroy them and the city of Montreal as they know it.
O'Neill is the author of Lullabies for Little Criminals, a novel that was a finalist for a Governor General's Literary Award and the winner of Canada Reads 2007. The Montreal-based writer was the first back-to-back finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize for The Girl Who Was Saturday Night in 2014 and her short story collection Daydreams of Angels in 2015.
She spoke with Shelagh Rogers about writing her latest novel When We Lost Our Heads.
Equal and opposite
"Marie and Sadie are such extraordinary and contrary children. They're smarter than the girls around them. They have more privilege, they're more daring. They're so unique. But the two of them are quite lonely in that they cannot meet their match anywhere.
They're always kind of elevating the game and their lives to keep up with one another.
"When they do finally meet each other, they're so intrigued; they have finally met someone who is their equal and can keep up with their imaginations. They also can't be apart from each other because they know there's so much to learn from one another. So they're always elevating the game and their lives to keep up with one another."
Complicated relationships
"There are so many elements to relationships that we don't like to talk about, especially with how women have these ambitions and these dark sides that actually are our creative sides. We're just afraid of the beauty of ugliness. So much of creativity and drives in life often come from what seems like seedy, almost sordid inspirations.
We're always in this denial and lying to everybody that we're these wondrous sort of people and all the evil is outside of us, but we all have it inside us.
"It's because we don't accept who we are as humans. We're always in this denial and lying to everybody that we're these wondrous people and all the evil is outside of us, but we all have it inside us.
Well-rounded women
"I think men have historically been allowed to be more complex. There's this idea that men have sexual drives that are uncontrollable and women are these more passive, receptive objects — possessions. I always hated that because it just made no sense to me. I always thought of women as human beings — and as such, we have these complexities.
Part of the reason why I set the novel in this particular time was because it was right before the first wave of feminism and women started asking the question: Are we actually people?
"Part of the reason why I set the novel in this particular time was because it was right before the first wave of feminism and women started asking the question: Are we actually people? Can we be considered people with the same personhood as men do?"
Outside gender norms
"The character George comes from a lot of different inspirations. Part of her was exploring a lot of the questions I myself had toward gender when I was that age — and still do now. My mother transitioned when I was very young and they changed their name to Abraham and dressed in traditionally masculine clothing. They lived in Provincetown because it was more of a mecca — you could live there without the strange hatred and prejudices that came, especially at that time.
It's such a contemporary conversation we've been having about gender, but this has always existed and we've just dealt with it in different terms, in different language.
"It's such a contemporary conversation we've been having about gender, but this has always existed and we've just dealt with it in different terms, in different language. I was interested in how George, who had this sort of what we'd call now a non-binary or trans male identity, would think about it in those times with the vocabulary and the ideas all around her. So I found that fascinating and I liked her. She sprung up, fully formed — and I'd always been interested in women writers who were attracted to breaking gender norms."
The power of books
"My whole life books have been everything. They just open up any world, any knowledge you can find within them. And the first time I ever began writing in journals as a child, the idea that I could fill books with my own words was the most extraordinary discovery I had ever made. When you write a book, your ideas are in the book and they go to the reader, but then the reader also now has this knowledge and they pass it on to other people.
That's why people are terrified of words and the pen is mightier than the sword, because once you have an idea on the page, it wants to make itself real.
"So the words from a book become magical — and they spread and proliferate in strange ways. If you write a radical idea, even though not everyone reads that text, they get the text from other places. That's why people are terrified of words and the pen is mightier than the sword, because once you have an idea on the page, it wants to make itself real.
Heather O'Neill's comments have been edited for length and clarity.