Zoe Whittall explains why heartbreak is a valid form of grief
CBC Radio | Posted: January 8, 2025 4:36 PM | Last Updated: January 8
The Ontario author discussed No Credit River on Bookends with Mattea Roach
Canadian writer Zoe Whittall wrote a poetic memoir that examines a type of grief that isn't always awarded the same weight as when a loved one dies — heartbreak.
"It feels like there's a culture of not admitting how profound that loss is. That romantic loss can be life-changing and altering and it can really impact the next few years of your life," said Whittall in an interview on Bookends with Mattea Roach.
In No Credit River, Whittall brings readers along through six years of her life which include the loss of a pregnancy, a global pandemic and abandoned love. Honest, emotional and painful, the collection of prose poems examines anxiety and creativity in the modern world as well as the intersection of motherhood and queerness.
Whittall, based in Prince Edward County, Ont., is an author, poet and screenwriter. Her past works include the short story collection Wild Failure and the novels The Fake, The Best Kind of People and Bottle Rocket Hearts.
Her previous poetry collections include The Emily Valentine Poems and The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life. She has received the Writers' Trust Dayne Ogilvie Award, a Lambda Literary Award and been shortlisted for the Giller Prize.
Whittall is also a juror for the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize alongside Danny Ramadan and Helen Knott.
She joined Mattea Roach to discuss her memoir in prose poems, No Credit River, and what it was like to write from an autobiographical perspective for the first time.
Mattea Roach: No Credit River tells the story of a failed relationship and its aftermath. You describe the book in its opening pages as an unreliable memoir in prose poetry. I was interested in you describing it yourself as unreliable right at the opening. What appealed to you about blurring the line in that way?
Zoe Whittall: The Ars Poetica (the text that introduces the collection) that starts the book is one of the last things that I wrote, and it felt like I needed to establish some things before the poetry, because it can be so slippery. I felt like anybody who is writing about a romantic relationship is not going to be telling you facts.
They're going to be telling you feelings and they're going to be going through their experience.
I felt like just laying out that fact at the beginning because, if people didn't write about heartbreak, we wouldn't have the Fleetwood Mac Rumours album, you know? It's a really universal experience, but it can feel so particular and it can be so humiliating and embarrassing to write about it and talk about it.
But there's this long literary history, and as a reader, I'm obsessed with reading about heartbreak.
As a reader, I'm obsessed with reading about heartbreak. - Zoe Whittall
Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept … I've always wanted to write a queer version of that book and this is what comes close. But this wasn't the kind of book that's like talking badly or trying to expose anything about a relationship.
It's really about my own wounds and my own vulnerability and wanting to get to the bottom of mistakes that I've made in the relationship.
MR: What are some of the specific challenges or negotiations that you were wrestling with when crafting this new book, given that it is this confessional type of work where you're talking about your own experiences in a relationship?
ZW: While I was writing it, I was very conscious about how there's very few literary works about femme-butch relationships and very few about femme and transmasculine relationships.
I feel like there's something about queer audiences and queer readerships that when we read work by people in our own communities, like our claws are out, we're ready to fight in a way. It's kind of dispiriting and terrifying as a writer. There's something scary about it in particular because the world, especially the world now, really distrusts trans people and on purpose misunderstands and hates trans people.
Also, the partners of trans people who are cis or who might be cis are considered also untrustworthy and somehow suspect.
It was important to me while writing that I acknowledge that, and also free myself from that sort of self-censorship that can happen. I had to let go of any kind of ideas of representation and think only about the artful quality or the real sort of vulnerability that I wanted to get at through language.
I had to let go of any kind of ideas of representation and think only about the artful quality or the real sort of vulnerability that I wanted to get at through language. - Zoe Whittall
At some point I felt like I shouldn't publish this. I was too scared. And my editor said, "Heartache is a universal experience."
He gave me the freedom to actually go a level deeper than I had because of those fears.
MR: Do you feel at all that there is a tension or a collision between being queer, but then also having this longing for motherhood and, specifically, wanting to have a kid yourself?
ZW: Yes. I feel like there's always a joke we used to make about queers being permitted an extended adolescence. A lot of my friends and I did not have the experiences most teenagers have until they came out. Then in your 20s, you were allowed to still be a teenager.
And then a lot of queer women my age have babies late because it's taken us longer to settle into our chosen families and to figure out our lives. Now, I think it's easier to come out and it's maybe easier to form family structures that are more traditional-looking earlier.
But I do think that what surprised me about growing older — I'm 48 — was just how much I started to think about this timeline that I think queers were sort of permitted to not have to think about, like we didn't have to conform and stay on these relationship escalators that were leading towards a certain kind of long-term monogamy that might be dysfunctional or heteronormative.
Then, when I reached 35, I was like, "I should start making these decisions. I should start thinking about my life in a different way."
That was surprising to me. There's a line in No Credit River about how illegible a woman's body can be if you don't have a child and how even amongst other queers, it starts to feel that way sometimes when everyone around you has kids.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Katy Swailes.