Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer blends together past, present, fact and fiction in novel Wait Softly Brother
Talia Kliot | CBC Books | Posted: October 5, 2023 1:14 PM | Last Updated: October 5, 2023
The Ontario writer’s novel is longlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's latest novel, Wait Softly Brother melds together the past, present, fact and fiction.
After Kathryn, the protagonist, leaves her long and tumultuous marriage, she returns to her childhood home, haunted by unanswered questions about her stillborn brother. While there, she learns of an ancestor who fought as a substitute soldier in the American Civil War and starts to fill in the blanks in her own writing. As she begins to question her memory and that of her parents, Kathryn weaves together stories of surprising beauty and hope.
Wait Softly Brother is on the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. The shortlist will be announced on Oct. 11.
Kuitenbrouwer is a writer and teacher at the University of Toronto. Her other novels include All Broken Things and The Nettle Spinner which was shortlisted for the 2005 Amazon First Novel Award. She currently lives in Prince Edward County, Ont.
Kuitenbrouwer spoke to CBC Books about how she wrote Wait Softly Brother.
Ethics from another time
"I went back to school in my late 40s to do a Masters and a PhD and one of the courses that I took was a novel course in American Realism. There was a novel that I read by William Dean Howells with an older character who was a substitute soldier. I'd never heard of that before. I had no idea what that was. It sent me into a bit of a research frenzy because it was this fascinating idea.
"The concept has to do with this first conscription in the U.S. where many men weren't that interested in fighting because they had seen depictions of the war in the media since it was the first war that was photo-journalized. They could see viscerally what was happening out there. So fewer people were signing up to fight. So they created this conscription concept. But there was a loophole, called substitution, whereby men who had the money, or families who had the money, could basically pay somebody to fight instead of them.
"The thing that interested me most about it was that in many cases the person buying or renting the other body to fight in their stead would actually feel responsible for the family in some cases and also the particular person who fought for them. So they might support their family or they might support them or help them if they came back home with disabilities. We're almost culturally completely different from a 19th-century person in that regard."
How two stories intertwine
"I was writing in this automatic way. I wasn't doing a lot of thinking through the plot or outlining or anything like that. I know from psychoanalysis that when you write automatically, often it's sort of unconscious material that's coming up. I was curious why the Civil War story was becoming so prominent in my writing interest.
I started to realize that just as the Civil War was a war between a country and itself, I was in the midst of an embattled marriage. I started to see parallels between those two stories. - Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
"I started to realize that just as the Civil War was a war between a country and itself, I was in the midst of an embattled marriage. I started to see parallels between those two stories. Then I thought, 'Oh my goodness.' The reason that I'm writing, the reason that I'm obsessed with this Civil War novel and also with these very alarming and violent scenes is something I need to process in my own life and that seemed to be aligned with this strife that I was experiencing in my marriage. So that's how the frame story happened and those two things came together. Writing is always a process. I don't really know what I'm writing until I'm in the midst of it. And then I start to pay attention to it in ways that might bring this story closer to the surface."
On writing violence
"I didn't want to pull back on [violence]. But even so, I pulled back on it a little bit. I mean, there's a moment in the novel where Kathryn, the protagonist of the novel, just sort of harangues a little bit about how editors make gendered decisions around who can write violence and who can't write violence. Typically women can't write violence. I've been asked lots of times to pull back on visceral scenes of violence in other texts and I just didn't want to do that this time. I felt also if I was going to really make the point that heteropatriarchy systems are dangerous and horrifying for men and women, it wouldn't work if I didn't also make the war as visceral as I could get away with."
The challenges of autofiction
"That felt risky. It's funny. It might have been the riskiest thing for me in the book to deploy my own name and to talk about a marriage being dismantled because that was a story that was close to the bone. And also, I'm a pretty private person.
"On top of it, I was talking about a tragic incident that occurred to my mum in my childhood. And my mum and my dad are still living. In fact, my mum provided quite a bit of research material for me. She had several long conversations with me about how she felt during the whole story about that baby. And then to take that story and to dismantle it and corrupt it and change it into what looks more like a novel or looks more like a narrative arc than the real story felt and still feels a little bit like a betrayal. Like maybe that wasn't cool for me to do.
It might have been the riskiest thing for me in the book to deploy my own name and to talk about a marriage being dismantled because that was a story that was close to the bone. - Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
"At the same time, I've been writing for long enough and my parents have been enduring these books that I come out with for long enough that when I talked to them, they felt they could survive it. So I just went with that. But that was hard to do.
"Even on top of it, what was maybe even harder, or at least as hard as that, having left a marriage, I felt like I didn't have a narrative. And so I didn't know how to deploy a voice that was independent of that old story. So that was also another complication just for me to find a voice that felt authentic to an experience that I was in the midst of forming."
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's comments have been edited for length and clarity.